Bush, like a Paul Simon song, but different: "still chickenshit after all these years."

Elizabeth Vargas of ABC asked him "But what is the plan if the sectarian violence continues? I mean, do the U.S. troops take a larger role? Do they step in more actively to stop the violence?"

And Old Georgie danced away from reality like a cat pretending it was never going to be in a fight at all -- the way he danced away from his National Guard obligations:

"No. The troops are chasing down terrorists. They're protecting themselves and protecting the people, and — but a major function is to train the Iraqis so they can do the work. I mean the ultimate success in Iraq — and I believe we're going to be successful — is for the Iraqi citizens to continue to demand unity."

Because, as we all know, Little Georgie is just too goddamn precious to EVER be kept to his word or his promise. To be fair, how would he ever know what it's like to finish something? Never has, all his life, not gonna start now, no matter how many people die in the process. Just walk away from the destruction and pretend it isn't on his personal karma.

The Bushes are a dynasty of vermin, and Monkey Boy is the weakest, most despicable in a long line. (Read Kevin Philips: American Dynasty -- it's enough to get the mob out there, charging up the hill with pitchforks and torches. And Philips is not exactly what you'd call a liberal. Just something the Bushies don't understand -- a man with principles instead of hallucinations or delusions of grandeur.)

Link

Arrest made at Coulter speech

Student arrested, charged with disorderly conduct after offensive question

...Coulter said she supported the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman on the basis that a good woman civilizes and inspires a man to strive for something better, leading to a question that was met with a stunned silence.

"You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage," said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. "How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?"

UT Police officers approached Raj to arrest him, resulting in a mass exodus of protesters chanting, "Let him go."


-- Actually, that's an interesting question, long as people are deciding who gets to define what marriage is and isn't. Well, ok, it's smartass -- but GOOD smartass, clever.

However -- ahhh, Ajai is a raghead and it's still Texas -- even in Austin.

Charlie Whitman in the Texas tower -- ok. Dead, but ok.

Ajai Raj giving a skinny blonde woman who was paid $30,000 to talk her form of trash -- out the door and a bit of a thrash ing from the good UT security staff. (You'd think for $30,00 an evening, she should be able to hold her own in a trash-talk.)

Link

Something about that dubious Dubai port contract...

The rationale keeps being "Oh, but Dubai is the Disneyland of the Arab world, where the Arab world goes to party. They're not political."

Anyone who's ever lived in a tourist town knows you depend on the good will of the tourists who bring the cash. Meaning, if FOR SOME REASON, the people of the Arab world get really pissed off at George Bush and his band of happy murderers, and decide that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE to slap down -- not just Bush and his sociopathic backers, but all of us here in America who pretty much agree with them that something should be done to slap down and sober up this bunch of petty thugs drunk on their own power -- they might pressure Dubai into agreeing with them, and allowing them to do something through the ports in Dubai.

And of course, Dubai will go along with them.

And we'll have 9-12.

When we tire of the rantings ravings and incoherent lunacies of pissant power-grabbers, psychopaths who justify their monstrous behaviour (sociopaths don't feel a need to justify THEIR monstrosity) by calling themselves Republicans or Democrats, Liberals or Conservatives, Christians, Jews, or Muslims, we can lift our eyes to ... no, not invisible friends in the sky .. to our monitor screens where someone else has already scanned the heavens.

This is what the Internet can actually do that's so amazing --
and this is one of the great websites --
The Astronomy Picture of the Day:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060226.html

A new one every day, each is explained by an astronomer,
for example this one, of the Eagle nebula. (2-26-06)




















Inside the Eagle Nebula Credit & Copyright: T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, NOAO, AURA
Explanation: From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust. Through this window, a brightly-lit workshop appears where a whole open cluster of stars is being formed. In this cavity tall pillars and round globules of dark dust and cold molecular gas remain where stars are still forming. Already visible are several young bright blue stars whose light and winds are burning away and pushing back the remaining filaments and walls of gas and dust. The Eagle emission nebula, tagged M16, lies about 6500 light years away, spans about 20 light-years, and is visible with binoculars toward the constellation of Serpens. The above picture combines three specific emitted colors and was taken with the 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, USA.

In an article about the Port Management to a Dubai-owned company, Molly Ivins compares corporations to sharks, i.e., all they do is kill and eat.

Puts me in mind of a short poem I read some years ago, maybe the late 70's, and I wrote it down:

Sharks never sleep says Cousteau
who should know
but really
like most people
they never wake.
Sleepwalking as an urge
as a stomach not yet a mouth
as a hunger not yet a mind.


(Oh, she refers to the Dubai Corporation in this article as "DP World," perhaps aware of the fact that in porn films, DP means "Double Penetration" i.e., simultaneous vaginal and anal fucking of a woman by two men.)

Damn -- "Dead Like Me' was a great show --
actually made Mandy Patinkin tolerable.

That old-time religion seen as a pie-in-the-face

These kids -- no respect for their elders.

AN NSA WATCHBIRD WATCHING YOU.

Big cats, small cats -- same thing

Dreaming of a sunny, tropical island with mango trees.

A cold day at the Oakland Zoo -- the Malaysian Fruit Bats (largest in the world -- 6-foot wingspan) are all inside, wrapped up above the heater.

Is this the reason law enforcement
didn't go after pedophiles until recently?

Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth

Working late in the developmental biology lab one night, Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination, he found that the snubbed beak of the mutant chicken had tiny bumps and protuberances along the edge of its beak that looked like teeth, alligator teeth to be specific. The accidental discovery revealed that chickens retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this feature long ago. The finding also resurrected the controversial theory of one of the founders of comparative anatomy, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire.

In the early 19th century, Saint-Hillaire observed that developing parrots have tiny bumps on their beaks that resemble teeth, something he ascribed to modern animals deriving from more basic primitive forms. But due to his developing battles with Georges Cuvier over evolution, the finding was forgotten until Harris, a graduate student, re-discovered it nearly 200 years later...

(Story continues here)

******************

I don't know if this is George W Bush's worst nightmare -- who knows what imaginary horrors he saw lying drunk in the gutter all those years -- but something like this was big enough for him to put it in the State of the Union Address ....

I guess "Scarce as hen's teeth" is just one more old saying that the next generation will hear and say "Wottinhell does THAT mean?"

Link

The "people responsible" for port deal? Bush, Rumsfeld say: Not us!

From Salon.com 2-22-06

It seems like just yesterday (see posting, below) -- and, in fact, it was -- that George W. Bush was insisting that the plan to turn over control of six U.S. ports to Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the government of Dubai, had been subjected to "careful review" by "people responsible in our government."

But just before Bush spoke yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace said they didn't hear about the plan until this weekend. And now the White House is saying that the president didn't learn about the plan until "the last several days" -- which is another way of saying, after his administration had already approved it.

So here's a question: If the "people responsible in our government" aren't the president, the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are they? The answer, it seems, is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is headed by Treasury Secretary John Snow, who used to be the chairman of CSX Rail, which sold its own port operations to Dubai Ports World in 2004. Snow's committee approved the Dubai Ports World deal earlier this month after a brief review. Federal law requires that the committee engage in a 45-day investigation -- and leave the final decision to the president -- when the plans of a company controlled by a foreign government could affect U.S. national security. Snow's committee didn't engage in such an investigation, and administration officials are apparently at a loss to explain why not.

The president is going to have to explain that one away if he has any hope of quelling a rebellion in his own party and shutting down criticism from Democrats. Bush tried to push back with blunt force yesterday, threatening to veto any legislation aimed at stopping the deal. Opponents, unfazed, are saying that they have the votes in Congress to override any such veto. Now the administration is trying another tack, saying that the president didn't know about the plan and that others in his administration should have done a better job of informing Congress along the way.

It's hard to see how a "they-a culpa" is going to be enough here. Members of both parties are calling on the White House to take a longer look at the deal and the national security concerns that may arise out of turning over the nation's ports to a company controlled by a country with ties to international terrorism. And while the White House usually wins such fights by playing the terrorism trump card -- see, warrantless spying, stymieing of investigation into -- that card is in the other hand this time. With Republicans and Democrats both charging the administration with exposing the country to unnecessary risk, the White House is going to have to say more than it should have handled the matter better. It may even have to answer the kinds of questions it is usually allowed to ignore. Among them: Is it just a coincidence that the president's nominee to run the U.S. Maritime Administration is currently a senior executive for Dubai Ports World?

Bush veto threat to save Dubai bid for U.S. ports

"After careful review by our government, I believe the transaction ought to go forward," Bush said, referring to a study that began in October and ended, quietly and without objections from inside his administration, on Jan. 16.

There are nearly 2300 dead Americans in iraq who know just how thorough a "careful review" by this mob of unconscious and conscienceless criminals can be.

"I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I am trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, 'We'll treat you fairly.' ''

And why people ask, does this bozo get away with this stuff? Because when he says something like that above "We'll treat you fairly" quote, thinking people just gape in horrified amazement and say "Whaaaa?"

These are the people -- tough realpolitik guys who, all along, keep telling us the old saw, that where countries are concerned, "we don't have 'friends,' we have common interests."

Personally, I don't really enjoy having ANY foreign country controlling the operation of our ports, even one with as many historically and continuing overlapping common intersts as does the UK with the US.

But Dubai?
The United Arab Emirates?

I said it before -- I would be more inclined to believe at least SOME of what that smiling jerk says if EVERY plan he endorses didn't end up putting OUR money in HIS old pals' pockets.

Charlie Brown and the Mugger.

Check the BUSH Family/UAE business-financial history.

Makes Cheney and Halliburton look like strangers who just met.

The thieving locusts are back on a roll, because after ALL we've heard and seen about them in the past year, the public -- so they perceive -- STILL hasn't even yelled about the pain and anger they feel from the continual abuse.

They have total contempt for us because we obviously deserve it. We're this administrations' battered wives, who insist it's gonna change (and this bully, unlike most battering bullies, doesn't even say 'I'm sorry'.")

We can be thankful, at least, that his cronies in congress realize there's an election coming up and there are enough people out there who are disgruntled to opt for the OTHER white meat -- the Democrats.

Let's imagine that will be better.

Link

Bush: "U.S. on Verge of Energy Breakthrough"

By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer

February 20,2006 | MILWAUKEE -- Saying the nation is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that would 'startle' most Americans, President Bush on Monday outlined his energy proposals to help wean the country off foreign oil."

***************

Well it would "startle" me if there were anything to it but blue sky and bullshit. After 5 years of immeasurable truckloads of those 'shine 'em on' items, I don't expect ANYTHING real from this bozo.

But I'd love to be 'startled.'

Iranian minister calls for end to cartoon violence

I told y'all that Popeye wouldn't go over big in Iran.

They didn't like Elmer Fudd, neither.
Nor Coyote and Roadrunner.

And yet, curiously, they still love the Three Stooges.
(But just the ones with Moe, Larry, and Curly --
They say "Shemp is a Zionist.")

Link

Israel Cuts Off Vital Palestinian Funds

************
February 20,2006 | GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- A moderate Gaza lawmaker was set to become the first Palestinian prime minister from the Islamic militant group Hamas, as Israel cut off vital funds and branded the new regime a "terrorist authority..."

The (Israeli) Cabinet decided to stop the transfer of the roughly $55 million a month it collects in taxes and tariffs on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The order did not specify when the payments would stop, but government spokesman Asaf Shariv said the next payment, scheduled for early March, "won't take place."

************************


Oh great -- they're refusing to pay the Palestinians what they owe them, refusing to pay them THEIR own money?

And that's supposed to lower tensions?

A brief history lesson -- the Vatican refused to recognize Israel until December 30, 1993 -- check this out:

Zionist leader Theodore Herzl met with Pope Pius X in January 1904 and asked the Roman Church to support Jewish aspirations for a return to their traditional homeland in Israel. The pope was blunt. "The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people."

And the Roman Church had a lot longer history of killing Jews than the Palestinians.

99 years later, on December 30, 1993, the Holy See decided to recognize Israel. Only 45 years after the State of Israel was established, and only 50 years after Pope Pius X quietly supported the Nazi effort to wipe out the Jews.

So what's the moral?

Who's the terrorist?

Nigerian Militants Blow Up Pipeline

************
February 20,2006 | LAGOS, Nigeria -- Militants holding nine foreign hostages in southern Nigeria destroyed an oil pipeline Monday and blew up a boat in violence that has cut about 20 percent of crude production in Africa's oil giant.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said it attacked a Shell-operated oil-pipeline switching station known as a "manifold" and a military houseboat in the oil-rich southern region. "Both were destroyed with explosives," the group said in an e-mail...

The West African nation is reeling from weekend attacks in which militants blasted oil and gas pipelines and sabotaged a key oil loading terminal belonging to Royal Dutch Shell. That and an earlier attack has forced the company to halt the flow of about 455,000 barrels a day -- about one-fifth of daily output in Africa's top crude producer.

**************

THIS gets press -- the persistent and methodical genocide of Nigerian Tribes, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell against those tribes that have refused to allow Shell to drill where they live -- that doesn't get much press at all.

(They hate Shell for its freedom, I guess -- its freedom to pay corrupt Nigerian officals to kill those who think Shell doesn't necessarily have a God-given right to own all that oil that's been under the land for the past hundred million years, and who think Shell doesn't have a right to destroy their land and their tribe in order to increase their profits. Terrorists, right?)

ONE MORE TIME -- UNSPINNING THE SHOOTER

His flacks keep harping on "Oh, the press is just too-too-terribly about the delay in telling them" as if that were the point. It's not -- not that the press, in general, has figured it out yet.

********
1. Cheney was accepting a bribe of a Vacation Weekend of Killing Living Things from a lobbyist for, among others, Baker-Botts (how convenient, Daddy's right hand enforcer's law firm).
Her primary promise to her clients is to influence the White House. Not too much regard for public opinion there, while lobbying influence-peddling is under scrutiny.
I'm sure -- like a 12-year-old brat -- Dick thinks his sociopathic cruelty and "Go fuck yourself" attitude is cool and tough. (So did Mussolini.)

*******

2. Cheney had no license -- minor, but another dose of this man's total contempt for the law or public opinion.

***********

3. 14 HOURS = time for the blood alcohol level to drop to reasonable numbers. (Oh, don't tell me there's no proof, not with a guy who has DUI citations hanging off him like a tail.)

**************

4. He talks about how horrible it was to "see the shot hit my friend in the face." We're not talking about a thrown frisbee here, or a nerf-ball:

IF YOU CAN SEE THE SHOT HIT,
YOU CAN SEE WHAT IT WAS GOING TO HIT
WHEN YOU PULLED THE TRIGGER

No trees, no foliage taller than waist high. Just a very slow-response time to seeing a person down the barrel and being too slow to stop the intent to kill a bird. That indicates Very Drunk.

THOSE ARE THE ACTUAL ISSUES HERE -- a lobbyist's bribe, total contempt for law and the public, drunk with a gun, and lying to the public, a sociopath confusing his malevolent viciousness for admirable toughness. In other words, Dick Cheney.

******************************

The Democrat's (WINNING) Ticket in 2008

Looking at 2008, no Hilary, no Kerry, no Gore --

No more tired old Party-Line approved retreads!


Wesley Clark and Russ Feingold --

these are two men who are smart enough and wise enough to know when to stay out of a war, and one of them actually knows -- from experience -- how to end one.

No more Rec Room Patriots who were all just too goddamn precious to interupt their rush to riches to answer a draft call to serve in the vicious no-win, criminal illegal war based on lies and bullshit and fear in Vietnam.

Coincidentally the exact same kind they then got us into in Iraq (thereby neutering any war on terror or pursuit of the son of the Bush Family's closest business ally -- Osama Ben Ladn or any of the Saudi's who attacked us on 9-11.)

This might seem like paranoid conspiracy theory today, but in 10 or 20 years, it'll be obvious to every historian, assuming the Bush family isn't STILL intimidating publishers and journalists.

CLARK and FEINGOLD
or
FEINGOLD and CLARK

Time for Americans to overcome their prejudices (no not because they're both Jews) against intelligence and actually elect someone with brains as president.


(I know I must be right about this since Alex Cockburn's "Counterpunch" is already attacking Clark. But then Alex Cockburn has that Brit attitude toward all Jews -- except perhaps, Lord Bernstein, owner of Granada TV and publishing, whose displeasures he was more than willing to convey to writers who irritated them.)

For the KLAN member most likely to feel like J. Edgar Hoover did after ...

...Hoover learned that the man he met with weekly for 10 years or more to discuss NATO security systems and measures -- Kim Philby -- was a Russian Spy.



HE RODE A BLAZING SADDLE, HE WORE A SHINING STAR:

Ron Stallworth, recently retired from police work, admitted in an interview that a major accomplishment during his 30 years as a cop was not only being a card-carrying member of the racist Ku Klux Klan, but he was even asked, as a "good, loyal Klansman," to lead the local Klan chapter in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The Klan didn't know he was a policeman. It also didn't know he was black.

"It was one of the most fun" investigations he was involved with, Stallworth said.

He did all of his contact with the Klan over the phone. When he couldn't avoid a meeting, a white officer went in his place. His investigation started in 1979, and he said he is amazed no one in the Klan ever caught on. (Deseret Morning News)

...Nah! When dealing with such mentalities it's not surprising he could keep hidden under the sheets for so long.

Link

The Great Mystery - - a Possible Answer -- hell, a LIKELY answer

Regarding Dick Cheney shooting his friend ... there's that "saw the shot hit him in the face..." which means, in short grass no higher than waist level, he HAD TO BE LOOKING AT HIS FRIEND when he pulled the trigger.

If you can see the shot hit, you can see what it hits while you're pulling the trigger.

So, oh, the great mystery: WHY 14 HOURS?

Because just in case there was going to be a breathalyzer test, a drunken nap of several hours followed by an invigorating waking shower should allow the blood alcohol to drop to acceptable levels.

Of course, as it turned out, this was Texas, where rich people and their friends get a "Pardon me for bothering you but I have to pretend to investigate" from their tame law enforcement officials.

Cheney was probably too drunk to remember that. (Hey, I know he's a vicious prick who would shoot anyone if he wanted to, drunk or sober -- I just think in this case, he didn't mean to do it, was just too blotto to stop his wheeling around gesture of shooting at a sound.)


Is it Occam's Razor or too far-fetched ---

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 — President Bush said Thursday that Vice President Dick Cheney had handled the disclosure of an accidental shooting of a hunting partner "just fine" and that the incident had been a "traumatic moment" for Mr. Cheney as well as a tragic one for the victim.

Right --"just fine" but what a shame poor Mr. Cheney had to suffer shooting his pal AND THEN having to talk about it..

(It's one thing for Ronnie Reagan to say "I forgot to duck."
It's a whole 'nother thing for these swine to say "HE forgot to duck.")

I dream of the entire Bush Family and their cronies in a re-enactment of that fabulous drama "One Night in Ekaterinaburg"

HOORAY FOR BOLLYWOOD

Add your own subtitles to Bollywood films (the selection you can play with changes every day) -- and send it to your friends as a new creative form of annoying email that takes a long time to load.

We used to do this in the olden days -- turn off the sound on a TV movie and provide dialogue -- then Woody Allen did it on screen and now we all can, too.

Now you can be a certified and certifiable Internet Smartass.

Free, so how can any of us resist?

(Warning -- it takes a while to load, so a fast server and a fast chip are advisable. DSL at least)

Link

Quiz Farm - free quizzes and quiz creation

Somewhat lame, somewhat fun, but hey, if you're passing time reading my rants and raves, this makes for a pleasant break.

Browse entire quiz directory

1.	What Group Are You? Chav, Rocker, Skater, Emo, Goth, Trendy, Prepy E.c.t
2.	What Highschool Clique Do You Belong To?
3.	How Will You Die??
4.	What Body Part Are You Attracted To?(pics)
5.	What is your sexual style?
6.	What's Your High School Stereotype?
7.	What type of girl are you?!!
8.	Which religion is the right one for you? (new version)
9.	Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? v1.0
10.	What do your eyes reveal about you?(PICS!)
	>>More quizzes

Link

A blog worth visiting ...

Don't know the person, just tracking back on someone who looked in on my generally angry work, and was calmed and charmed... it's called:

The Animal Sola Can't Find Her Keys, Baby


Here's a taste, first paragraph, from the most recent post:

I’m walking crosstown, through Times Square, and T is on the line telling me a story. A while ago, he worked in a bookstore and an old man died on him while he was trying to help him find a book on Buddhism. The passing of this man in T’s presence brought him a renewed sense that life was too short to not be doing what he wanted to be doing, and it also left him with a book on Buddhism – a book which, oddly enough, addressed death and the earthly plane within the first few pages.


I put a permanent link to it down the right-hand column

Link

The Lancet's comment concerning the "HUH? Wha? Did I miss it?" Healthcare plans in Bush's most recent SOTU chat

The Lancet is the most respected Medical Journal, in the UK, and more than arguably, in the world. And they have some questions about Bush's non-comments on healthcare in his most recent State of the Union chat.

Before you say "Yeah, well England's National Health isn't nearly as good as ours," neither is ours, not nearly as good as we tell ourselves it is -- or haven't you heard about employers cancelling coverage it for employees and the providers others refusing life-saving treatment for subscribers.

The 40+ million Americans who have NO health coverage would be delighted to have National Health.

The Lancet Friday February 17, 2006; 367:541

DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68193-2

The state of US health-care reform

In the weeks before US President George W Bush's annual State of the Union address, rumours abounded that he would use the speech to propose bold new initiatives to reform the USA's troubled health-care system. The problems plaguing the world's most expensive health-care system are not new. Costs continue to spiral, far outpacing inflation, and now consume 16% of the US gross domestic product. This is far more than is spent by any other developed nation, all of which achieve equal or better health-care outcomes. The rising costs are forcing employers to cut benefits or to shift costs to workers by offering plans with higher deductibles and requiring higher out-of-pocket co-payments. Some are dropping coverage altogether. The number of uninsured, most of whom are low-income workers and their families, continues to climb and is now estimated to be 45 million, roughly one in seven Americans. Many more are underinsured.

Given these and other problems, it seemed natural that the President would use the State of the Union address to propose ways to reform the system. So it came as a surprise when he dedicated only two short paragraphs of his speech to health care and did little more than tout three old and rather shopworn initiatives. He again promised to promote the use of electronic records and information technology. He again asked Congress to change US medical malpractice laws to cap damages. And he again pushed health-savings accounts (HSAs).

None of these proposals comes near to the comprehensive reform needed to address the problems that beset the US health-care system. Increased use of electronic records and information technology, though needed, will take years to implement—and even then, they will not make a sizeable dent in health costs. Changes in medical malpractice laws are likely to reduce the often staggeringly high malpractice premiums paid by many US doctors, especially those in high-risk specialties such as obstetrics and neurosurgery, and may reduce some costs because of the practice of “defensive medicine”, but alone will do little to reduce overall health spending. And HSAs are likely to make things worse.

HSAs allow individuals to purchase a high-deductible insurance plan to cover the expense of a major illness and to create a tax-free account from which he or she can draw to pay for routine health expenses. Money left over at the end of the year can then be rolled over to the next and added to, so that over the years an account could accumulate substantial tax-free savings. Proponents argue that, by forcing patients to pay for more, HSAs will make patients cost-conscious shoppers who will think twice about going to get unnecessary or overly expensive care, and, in turn, health-care providers, to win the custom of these patients, will be forced to compete on the basis of price and quality. HSAs, proponents argue, will impose market discipline on the system.

HSAs will certainly appeal to the well and well-off who generally have low health expenses and, because of their higher incomes, are more likely to benefit from the plan's tax advantages. The high-deductible plans will, indeed, be more affordable to some low-income workers, but the premiums will remain well beyond the means of most uninsured Americans. And there is a real danger that low-income enrollees will not seek necessary care, in particular preventive care, because of the out-of-pocket expense. Patients with expensive chronic illnesses, of course, will stay with traditional plans. So while healthy low-cost patients move off to HSAs, chronically ill patients will concentrate in traditional plans, which will have no choice but to raise premiums.

It is not clear how the market discipline that is supposed to emerge from HSAs will make a substantial difference to the cost of health care. Health-care costs are being pushed up mainly by the ageing of the population, an increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, and the high prices of new medical technologies, not by patients visiting their doctors unnecessarily.

Why President Bush did not come forward with a serious reform plan for the US health system is unknown. Perhaps he felt he is potentially too weak to push major initiatives at this time. Unfortunately, he has chosen to push initiatives that at best nibble around the edges of the problem and at worst are likely to make America's health-care system even more expensive and inequitable.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa wait a second here...

"The bird flushed and I turned and fired and I could see the shot hit my friend in the face and...

and
if he could see it hit Whittington in the face, it meant he could see Whittington's face when he fired. Right?

So as to why it took 18 hours to come up with THE story --
it took 18 hours to come up with A story.

Just one more lie from the man who will be remembered as the man who made Americans re-consider -- that maybe the Communists weren't such bad guys after all, maybe they didn't have such a bad idea after all, if they were thinking of people like Cheney.

He's a VIP, alright -- Vicious Insulting Prick

Four Dallas Police Officers Shot

February 16,2006

Four police officers were shot Thursday as they tried to serve a federal drug warrant on a home in southwest Dallas.

The officers had approached the home in an armored personnel carrier, Watson said. When they announced the raid over a loudspeaker, someone inside the home started shooting, he said...

The suspects later surrendered. Authorities said three people, including a 10-year-old boy and a person who was wounded, were taken into custody.

**********************

---with 28 gauge overpriced shotguns? It's becoming a new sport in Texas? I mean more than in the Oil Swamps of Victoria ... ahh bad analogies. Sorry. Nasty joke in poor taste.

Especially because shooting each other has ALWAYS been sport in Texas.

It's why Ben Taub Hospital in Houston developed a gunshot trauma emergency room back inthe 1970's capable of routinely saving people who'd be written off as D.O.A. anywhere else.

Sorry about that, officers. Hope you all recover without any ill effects.

Peggy Noonan -- well, she wrote the line "Morning in America," didn't she? So now it's "Sunset on Cheney." (Or, to put it another way, she's saying "I, like the rest of the rats who went along with a moron and overlooked his pathology because he had the money and connections to win, now I am scuttering off the sinking ship.)

****************

Hit Refresh?
Why Bush may be thinking about replacing Cheney.

Thursday, February 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST The Dick Cheney shooting incident will, in a way, go away. And, in a way, not--ever. Some things stick. Gerry Ford had physically stumbled only once or twice in public when he became, officially, The Stumbler...

Same with Dick Cheney. He's been painted as the dark force of the administration, and now there's a mental picture to go with the reputation. Pull! Sorry, Harry! Pull!..

I suspect what they're thinking (the Bush Administration) and not saying is . . . wouldn't you like to replace Cheney?"

...Who would that be? That's what I suspect the president's men are asking themselves. But silently...

******************

She overlooks one thing -- Bush is Cheney's sock puppet, his bitch. So how does BUSH get to make the choice? Only thing I see is the traditional Republican answer to this sort of situation -- small plane crash.

*****************

Some interesting points about the Dick who's second-in-command

Mr. Vice President, It's Time to Go

By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 16, 2006

There's a reason Dick Cheney is obsessive about shunning the spotlight. His record is not the kind you want to hold up for intense scrutiny.

More than anyone else, he was fanatical about massaging and distorting the intelligence that plunged us into the flaming quagmire of Iraq...

And while the nation's brave young soldiers and marines were bouncing around Iraq in shamefully vulnerable Humvees and other vehicles, dodging bullets, bombs and improvised explosive devices, Mr. Cheney (a gold-medal winner in the acquisition of wartime deferments) felt perfectly comfortable packing his fancy 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun and heading off to Texas with a covey of fat cats to shoot quail.

Matters went haywire, of course, when he shot Mr. Whittington instead.

That was the moment when the legend of the tough, hawkish, take-no-prisoners vice president began morphing into the less-than-heroic image of a reckless, scowling incompetent who mistook his buddy for a bird...

Read the rest here.

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Gotta think in terms of Dick Cheney being in the role of Spiro Agnew, who was Nixon's Nixon (i.e., as was Nixon to Ike -- the mud-slinging, underhanded, dirty-dealing, vicious thug, willing to do the sort of things that make decent men vomit, and who thinks of it as 'being tough,' instead of realizing it means he's just an ambitious shameless greedy slavey sociopath who figures he's already damned forever so why not pile up the additional crimes).

Except in this administration it's more like Cheney is Spiro Agnew to President Dan Quayle.

People tell me you can't hold a physical anomaly against a person (Cheney's sneering mean-villain facial expression) to which I can only answer with the old observation "By the time a man is 50, he's created the face he has by his actions."

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Link

Oh -- about Dick Cheney taking a hunting weekend on a lobbyist's ranch,

-- in the middle of a scandal about lobbyists...

("Oh, I've never lobbied him that I can remember" said the lady...)

It's rude to call a lady a lying bitch, so I won't.


--- from ATTYTOOD, the Philly flash:

"Armstrong became a lobbyist just three short years ago. She had no prior experience in lobbying, nor does she have a law degree. Her recent governmental experience consists of her recent stint as chair of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. In recent years, the divorcee has been raising her three kids and been involved in philanthropic causes around Dallas...

companies are paying big bucks for the Texas-based Armstrong to lobby the federal government in Washington -- including, yes, the White House...

Houston law firm Baker Botts -- the favorite American law firm of the Saudi royal family, among many international clients -- paid Armstrong $160,000 in 2004 to lobby the Bush White House:

The records indicate she was paid the money after she "communicated with the White House on behalf of Baker Botts clients."

In a phone interview, she told NBC News that in return for the money in one case, she set up a meeting at the White House for a Baker Botts client, although she said she felt she could not release the client’s name.

"A meeting for doing something with one of their clients," she said, describing the event. "I’m not at liberty to say which." She says she cannot remember which White House official the meeting was with. She also said that during the inauguration proceedings, she got Karl Rove to speak at a Baker Botts function. "I got them Karl Rove," she said.

She insists that she never lobbied Bush or Cheney directly.

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Well what would you expect -- that Dick Cheney has ANY friends who actually tell the truth?
Who even know how?

Read the rest of the disgraceful story at Attytood

It's enough to start the pitchfork- and torch- carriers on their way down Pennsylvania Avenue...

U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster

HI KIDS --
Mr.ROGERS HERE --
CAN YOU SAY "HYPOCRITES?"

JERUSALEM, Feb. 13 — The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement...

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I thought the Palestinians got to vote on the government THEY wanted?

So when the Ayrabs and the rest of the dark-skinned world sneer and spit at the US's talk of DEMOCRACY, guess what?

They're telling us something we need to know.

Gunboat Diplomacy -- same as it ever was.

Except our empire is over, and this is all about denying it, kicking and biting and throwing a tantrum and hitting mommy and screaming in the supermarket --

"I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT!"

Well, as the song goes, "YOU CAN'T HAVE IT," so grow up and get over it.

The poorest of us (in the USA) are so fucking rich compared to people all over the world, but we want more more MORE MORE MORE MORE...

And the richest of us are the worst.

A note: IT AIN'T DEMOCRACY IF WE TELL THEM WHETHER OR NOT WE LIKE THE WAY THEY VOTED AND THEN MAKE PLANS TO OVERTHROW THEM. IT'S CALLED IMPERIAL COLONIALISM ...

and you know what, kids? THIS KING GEORGE is just as fucking crazy as George the Third was, ranting raving and without a clue.

Link

No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident

I HAVE A QUESTION NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT --

Just how far above the law does our Vice Presidential Storm Trooper wannabe think he is?
How far above the law IS HE?

Aside from deciding he doesn't need to get the same license ever OTHER asshole with a gun needs by Texas law, Ms Armstrong is a LOBBYIST who does business with the feds -- and there's Dickhead Cheney, accepting a weekend at her ranch.

Do we detect a little bit of contempt for the opinions of the American Public about government people accepting bribe-gifts from lobbyists?

("Oh, I don't THINK I ever lobbied HIM," said the little lady. -- No, she just bribed him with weekends of gals and guns and it was all tacit, implicit, wink-wink, smooch- smooch.)


"Among the people with him at the Armstrong Ranch in South Texas was his host Katharine Armstrong, a lobbyist and longtime friend of Mr. Cheney. Her lobbying clients include several that do business with the federal government, though Ms. Armstrong said she did not believe that she had ever lobbied Mr. Cheney...

Texas officials said on Monday night that Mr. Cheney would be issued a warning citation for hunting without a proper game stamp on his license. The local sheriff said an investigation had concluded that the episode was "no more than an accident."

Another question I have -- if it was just a minor peppering with shot, HOW COME MR. WHITTINGTON WAS IN INTENSIVE CARE SATURDAY AND SUNDAY?


What a piece of work is Mr. Cheney.

What a piece of detritus is Mr. Cheney.

He's got total contempt for all of us and we just take it.

And if we take it ...

and if we take the $mulit- billion free oil payoff (no royalties) from our national lands...

and if we take the 292% increase in profits Halliburton has made from the killing of Iraqi's and Americans ....

if we take it all without a word...

We fucking well DESERVE his contempt, that sneering, sleazy venomous spider who hides out in dark places and leaps out to pretend he's a man from time to time.

We deserve contempt for our passivity.

Link

Echolalia in the Republican Party

The neurological disorder known as echolalia is characterized by a person repeating the words someone else has said.

In the neurological disorder known as the Bush Administration, it's called "talking points."

Dick Cheney shot another fellow while hunting -- accident .... accident .... accident ... accident...

Mary Matalin tells us that Cheney is very unhappy about it but he didn't do anything he shouldn't have done ... anything he shouldn't have done ... anything he shouldn't have done...

In this specific, truly insignificant (but amusing) incident (amusing to anyone but Mr. Whittington, the recipient of Mr. Cheney's birdshot blast) it is important to remember, anything said by Mary Matalin, Bill O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, et al IS HEARSAY ... it's WHAT THEY"VE BEEN TOLD TO SAY.

Or as the old old saying goes:

"VASS YOU DERE, CHOLLIE?"

NO, they vassn't dere, any more than the Bushies were there in Vietnam, or there in Iraq, or there in the unemployment line.

And of course, anything Scott McClellan says is always HEARSAY.
Good boy Scott, here's a cookie.

Doesn't anyone else find it disconcerting that these people are paid a lot of money to go out and say their lines and call it news? And attack anyone who disagrees with what they said, even though they have no way of knowing whether or not there's any fact or truth in what they said.

And then people who are more or less actual journalists write it down and call it news. Doesn't disturb you? Not even after the 711,422 lies already said and exposed by this administration's hench-creatures? Like the not-very-swift liars of the Swioft Boat set?

No?

Well then, William Blake was right, insofar as that goes, when he says (and this may be truly horrible to contemplate while MonkeyBoy and his Masters are sitting in the Seat of Power) ---

"People don't get what they deserve -- they get what they resemble."

As in -- "He's just like us -- ignorant as shit and proud of it."

(Ignorant in its literal meaning, i.e., refusing to learn anything that person doesn't want to learn, usually because it might not reinforce the supposed facts the person already knows.)

If he's our reflection in a mirror -- even in a dark mirror, then we ALL have a lot of self-reflection, contemplation, and decision-making to do.

A Prophetic Quote

"A year from now I'd be surprised if there's not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush."

Richard Perle 9/03

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Close but no cigar.
It's an outhouse with a sign over it that says, in Arabic, "Come in and shit on President Bosh."
And it's in Fallujah.

Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter

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February 12,2006 | WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was 'alert and doing fine' after Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong."

****************

Accident my ass.

According to sources, Whittington said, jokingly, Well Dick, looks like your boys are gonna put you right in the shit," referring to the Valerie Plame, Wilson, and Albright* slander-projects that Cheney instigated, and that landed Scooter-Pie Libby in the same doo-doo from which he's now testifying to the grand jury.

Cheney wheeled around and said, "Yeah? Go fuck yourself, you old piece of shit," and fired.

Couldn't have been an accident because Dick Cheney is a lashing smashing hunk of man who doesn't make mistakes or have accidents and a man who enjoys the fact there are rumors about how he's had people killed.

Of course, it could have been -- wink wink, damn got something in my eye -- just an accident.


* Albright publicly urged that the weapons inspectors be given more time. Cheney had his boys look for dirt on him a week before he went after Ambassador Wilson

Whale Meat Glut a Problem for Japan

By HIROKO TABUCHI Associated Press Writer

February 09,2006 | TOKYO -- Japan has enticed children with whale burger school lunches, sung the praises of the red meat in colorful pamphlets, and declared whale hunting "a national heritage."

But Tokyo has a dilemma: by rapidly expanding its whale hunt, Japan now kills more of the giant mammals than its consumers care to eat...

It's a tough sell.

"To put it simply, whale meat tastes horrible," said 30-year-old Kosuke Nakamura.

But the glut of whale meat hasn't stopped the harpoon guns. Tokyo plans to kill -- under a research program -- some 1,070 minke whales in 2006, over 400 more than last year. Japan will also hunt 10 fin whales, and a total of 160 Bryde's, sei and sperm whales, fisheries official Kenji Masuda said.

Some local governments have begun offering whale meat in school lunches.

Wakayama, a prefecture with a whale-hunting tradition 280 miles southwest of Tokyo, has been aggressive in getting youngsters to eat whale, introducing whale meals at 270 public schools in 2005.

Nutritionists have even developed child-friendly whale dishes, including whale meatballs, hamburgers and whale spaghetti bolognese, said Tetsuji Sawada of Wakayama's education board.

************************************

---Too bad Jim Capaldi isn't still around.

I have friend in Houston whose job

has caused him to see and/or meet Ken Lay and Skilling a couple of times.

(... or Lie and Killing as we refer to them out here)

And he says he thinks they're actually nice guys, especially Ken Lay who, he contends, seems as if he didn't have a clue what was going on.

BUT -- every time we pay our $300 a month PG&E bill (which jumped from $120 a month thanks to Enron a few years back and never came down) I think:

"Send them to the new Florence Colorado, Max Security Fed Prison, 22.5 hour a day lockdown, beatings, deprivation -- and pay for their incarceration by charging visitors $25 each to come and piss into their cells. All their former employees whose retiremements they gutted -- they get to piss for free."

If that's too harsh, then some other High Security Prison, one like the California State Prison at Soledad, aka The Gladiator School, where new fish are given a garbage can lid and a stick and set loose in the yard.

They always talk, these thieving pieces of shit that actually call themselves "businessmen" with a straight face, they always talk about how tough they are. OK. Let's take them at their word.

I think Guantanamo would be ok, too -- nice tropical paradise.

The point I make to my friend about them being nice guys is this -- "So what?"

They're not being put on trial for being unpleasant.
Or for being vague.

They were busted for being thieves.

And even Kenny Boy's pal, George W Bush (who didn't him, he doesn't think) couldn't kill the case or even keep it out of court while he still plays video games in the Oval Office.

Put them in with prisoners who robbed and killed because they couldn't afford to pay their heating bill. Let them discuss the niceties of financial percentages out in the general population.

Bush's Social Security Sleight of Hand

If you read enough numbers, you never know what you'll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.

year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

---AND he's a sneaky little prick, too. Must have learned that one getting in to sniff his momma's underwear drawer.

Link

Palestinian children hold an anti-Danish banner during a joint Hamas and Fatah movement demonstration, just outside Jerusalem on Feb. 7, 2006, to protest against caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed.
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WOW! These people are as crazy as Reverend Wildmon and Pat Robertson et al. I've said it before and I'll say it again:

"Religion is NOT the opiate of the masses. It's the crystal meth."

He wants to cut the Social Security benefit that's ALREADY obscenely small?

Don't ever tell me this man has a soul, a spirit, a conscience, or a brain.

The Wizard of Oz would be hard pressed to come up with all the stuff this piece of crap that pretends to walk and talk like a man needs to actually become a real boy.

(Yeah, I know I'm mixing literary metaphors there -- so what? Compared to Monkey Boy, at least I've actually read some books.)

This creature whose daddy and friends bought him a seat in an Oval Office is something like an animatronic construct made of a mixture of smegma and meesure with a dysfunctional chip in its hard drive that keeps needing to be replaced.

HEY DEMOCRATS!!

DOES ANYTHING EVER GET YOU ANGRY?
OR HAS THE DARK LORD THAT RUNS HIS PROGRAM SO INTIMIDATED YOU, YOU'RE WILLING TO THROW PEOPLE INTO THE OVENS RATHER THAN BE OUT OF A CUSHY JOB?

Ahhhh, fuck you all.

I think I'll post poetry and comments on art.

(Or to paraphrase the way Paul Krassner and Robert Anton Wilson have put it -- fucking is such a sweet, loving, and pleasurable thing, the proper invective is "Ahhh, UN-fuck you all.")

GOP Chair Says Clinton Turns Off Voters

-- as someone who regards Ken Mehlman as a straight-out liar every time I see him, this is the first time I think I've ever heard anything that's probably true.

I'm someone who usually votes Democratic, and she lost my vote when she plumped for a flag-burning amendment. I think the Bush Republicans have taken away more than enough First Amendment Rights all by themselves.

And this wiggle-wobble on Iraq is Gore-Kerry-Custardy bullshit.

"We shouldn't have gone into Iraq (in other words, it was a criminal venture) but now that we're there, we can't leave." (Sort of like "I shouldn't have broken into your house, but now that I'm in there and have committed a felony, I really should do the right thing and take all your stuff and kill your dog, too.")

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"Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential presidential contender in 2008, "seems to have a lot of anger" and voters usually do not send angry candidates to the White House, the Republican Party chairman said Sunday."

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--on the other hand, Mrs Clinton's anger is perhaps her most attractive (and vote-encouraging) aspect. It's the single most notably lacking attribute I can see in any and almost all of the Democrats, something I usually link with a similar lack of spine -- unless that's part of the same thing. (Actually her anger seems faked, and THAT IS unattractive.)

If Dukakis should have gotten angry when he was considering the rape of his wife, how then should we respond after watching the rape of our country these last five years?

Angry as hell. (And if there's a God, pray that we don't have to take it much longer.)

And the first rude sketch
that the world had seen
was joy to his mighty heart,
till the Devil whispered
behind the leaves
"It's pretty, but is it Art?"


Rudyard Kipling

If you kick a dog, don't wonder why it's biting you... or "Why so surprised that the Palestinians elected a Hamas government?

And I AM NOT calling Arabs dogs (especially since Arab people do not have the warm fuzzy feelings about carnivores that sniff each others' asses and eat their own vomit that we do). I'm only using it to make an analogy.

(My only complaint with the Arabs, historically, is that they invented Algebra and other forms of higher mathematics, and I can't understand them any better than I can read that beautiful script their language is written in. But without them, we'd still be counting on our fingers, as the Romans did.)

Perhaps a better title would be:

"If you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you fuck with his life, kill his family, despoil his holy places, and insult his country, he'll find a way to get back at you."

In a quantum universe, cause doesn't always bring a direct traceable effect, but the election of Hamas -- and the terror it's causing in government circles -- convinces me to present this sequence of events:

After WWII, we overthrew the Mossadegh government of Iran in order to put the monster Reza Pahlavi onto the resurrected Peacock Throne, and he -- with our backing -- created a secret police that seemed like nothing so much as an homage to the gestapo. The people of Iran really didn't like it.

In the Nixon years, after the grass-roots revolutionary overthrow of the government of Iraq, we installed Saddam Hussein as its 600-pound gorilla. The people who did it, the ones who played patty-cake with him throughout the Reagan Administration (George HW Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al) used April Glaspie during the Prez 41 Regime to sucker Saddam Hussein into crossing into Kuwait (Ms Glaspie later died in a curious single-car fatal accident and is unable to verify what happened). They knew it could work since Kuwait was slant-drilling Iraqi oil, as well as having been -- in a part of the world where memories go back 4,000 years -- part of Iraq until 1923 when the Brits cut it out of their country). So 43 convinced the Saudi's that Saddam was actually massing to invade their sandbox. The reason for this was to get -- finally -- a US Military Base in Araby.

The Ben Ladn family -- long-time friends and business partners to the Bushes -- helped persuade the king to let the US do it.

After our mujahaddin-armed and trained forces ran the Russians* out of Afghanistan back to their dachas, Osama ben Ladn came home, loaded for bear.

His mission? Asking his poppa for money so he could put an army together and head north and take out Saddam Hussein whose secular attitude (women could drive, run their own businesses, people could buy an alcoholic drink in hotels, etc) he considered a "disgrace to Islam."

As far as Osama was concerned, Saddam was a devil, a blood enemy. (No chance in hell for there to be that so-called alliance -- and our government people all knew it -- or should have. They also knew that Saddam, despised as much by everyone on all sides as George W Bush has become, could never admit he had no WMD's.)

When Osama found out that his people had allowed the United States to put a military base on their sacred land, he was shocked and appalled and told his father and the princes, essentially "Fuck you too."

This led to two attempts to remove the World Trade Center Towers -- the second one we all know about (since Bush 43 can't stop ringing that 9-11 bell).

---with me so far? This all happened.

OK -- by 9-12, the Bushies knew they could do a fast shuffle and convince the stunned American public that they had to go into Iraq, because Saddam and Osama were both -- well, in the Bush/Redneck/Texas eyes, they were both what the oilmen call "sand niggers." So of course they'd be pals, just like, for example, Midwestern white Americans like Dick Cheney and Michael Moore are buddies.

(Oh, there was also the matter of $5 billion in kickbacks from Saddam to Vice Prez Bush given when Bush was leader of the Iraq side group in the Iran-Iraq War scenario-scheming. Coincidentally, the same amount found missing from Banco Lavoro, the conduit for such bribes, and blamed on a 25-year old clerk. Those documents had to disappear.)

And the invasion of Iraq led more or less directly to the election of Hamas in Palestine. (Among other shifts toward the more extreme practitioners of Islam all over the world. Think Pat Robertson in a turban.)

And that, dear friends, is how Hamas (a group we helped form, along with Ariel Sharon, as an alternative to Yassar Arafat's people. Sharon is getting out while the getting's not as bad as it's going to get.)

This is not a "They're good -- we're bad" rant.

They (Saddam Hussein, Osama Ben Ladn, Wowie Zarqowi, Zawahiri, et al) seem to be religious-fanatic sociopath monsters -- again, think Pat Robertson in a turban.

This is "They're monsters -- we're a bunch of stupid assholes poking sticks at scary monsters, assholes too ignorant and arrogant to notice they're really getting pissed off."



*(Zbignew Brzezinski has bragged that it was he who taunted the Russians into invading Afghanistan.)

Ability to Wage 'Long War' Is Key To Pentagon Plan

Conventional Tactics De-Emphasized

By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 4, 2006; Page A01

The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.

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And how is this different from our history of small wars, clandestine overthrows of governments, assassinations, death squads, and extirpation of inconvenient indigenous peoples?

In 1964, I was told by a Marine Corps Master Sergeant that up to that time, we had been in 176 shooting wars. I knew then that 9 out of 10 Americans couldn't even name half of the ones in the 20th century -- and there was a lot less 20th century to deal with then.

So we go back to the days of the Death Squads?
(Oh, yeah, I forgot -- Negroponte's back in favor)

I don't want to be naive, but AMERICA, when will you live up to your promises?
When will we be able to be proud -- in a moral sense -- of what our government does?
When will someone in that oval office actually read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?
When will someone claiming to be Christian actually recoil at the idea of sanctioned murder?
When will someone in authority realize that this sort of vicious power game is EXACTLY what has led to the terrorist attacks -- disenfranchised people with burning anger being led by people we've made rich manipulating them for their OWN vicious power games?

I do hope I live long enough to see that. But I fear that would make me a very very very old man.

Link

Half-past a half-assed administration

OK -- we all already know that the construct that calls itself George W Bush is a lying piece of shit that attempts to walk like a man (actually, more of a prance than a walk), but even throughout this administration that has been thoroughly incompetent at anything but stealing from the American public, there was some methodology.

But this -- blathering about promoting research into alternative energy sources in his annual performance bullshit art speech -- this was a new low.

In past years, he would lie about anything, tell us how he will do this and do that -- and THEN, in following weeks, gut the budget for those items. But now they're really losing it in the Skunkworks shop that keeps his simulacra chips clean and operative ... this time, everyone knew HE'D ALREADY cut the budget on those items. Repeatedly. Everyone except them.

When they can't even keep their lies together, you know (YOU KNOW), as Wm Burroughs said about just this type of people:
"Pack yer ermines Mary, the whole shithouse is going up in chunks."

John Birch and Tao Chu Kwang

I once wrote articles using the name Tao Chu Kwang. Here's why:


I grew up hearing about John Birch, the Baptist Missionary who went to China, since, in his rather presumptuous view, their version of a divine being was inferior to his.

The image was of this devoted man in a dusty village, kneeling in prayer, leading the humble folk into the Paths of Righteousness,when slavering Red Chinese soldiers came in waves and killed everyone who dared to wear the cross.

Oh yeah, he was also an officer working for Claire Chennault and his romantic mercenaries, the Flying Tigers.


Then I met a man who had been there, in China, in Suchow, at the train station. He'd been waiting for the train to come in when a friend of his, a Chinese national told him he'd better leave, find another way of travel but get out of town fast as he could as all hell was about to break loose insofar as Americans were concerned.

The reason?

The train was filled with troops who were coming off years of combat when John Birch and his factotum boarded. Birch singled out two soldiers stretched out on facing seats and told them to get up and give him their seats, that he was an American Man of God, and it was their duty to defer to him.

The two soldiers, having been through the hell the Japanese had inflicted in China, the rape of Shanghai being only the most publicized part of it, laughed.

Whether or not they spoke or understood English, Birch's meaning was clear, and they returned words or gestures to him of which the meaning was also clear. Birch became infuriated and pulled out a pistol and shot the soldier who was flipping him the bird. His buddy raised his rifle and blew Birch away.

The soldier who killed the Uniformed Officer/Missionary?

Tao Chu Kwang.

Birch's aide survived and did a Jim Frey on it, making up images of high-minded heroics and an accidental shot in the thigh and how he'd been beaten and left for dead.

I used the name -- Tao Chu Kwang -- as a jape, to write a weekly column. And every so often, I'd get a message from someone to the effect: "Tao Chu Kwang was the greatest man in the world." Not a bad writer, either.

Boehner elected House majority leader - Feb 2, 2006

Well they made their choice --

No DeLay and they'd rather have a Boehner than a Blunt.

A bunch of hard-ons in suits.

(So is the country ready for Frist f---ing?)


Sometimes I think I died a long time ago and now the world is just the fleeting images released as energy in my disintegrating mind -- mostly written by Charles Dickens, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern. I guess I could do a lot worse.

Link

"Bush administration: The president didn't mean what he said in SOTU

"Remember that bit in Tuesday night's State of the Union address where George W. Bush said that new technology will help the United States 'replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025'?

Forget it.

'This was purely an example,' Bush's energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, tells Knight Ridder. Bodman says the president's real goal is to reduce foreign oil imports from anywhere, not from the Middle East in particular. An administration official says Bush used the words 'Middle East' in his State of the Union address just so 'every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.'

Understands what, we're not exactly sure. During his speech Tuesday night, Bush said he will press the fight against 'tyranny' around the world, push to lower the costs of healthcare, propose increases in funding for education and research, lead a renewed fight against HIV/AIDS and cut the deficit in half by 2009. Are we to 'understand' that those were 'just examples,' too?

-- Tim Grieve

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or as some smartass who flies under the flag called SAINTPERLE more or less said the other day:

"That backstabbing, bushwhacking, pusillanomous sonofabitch Bush will say ANYTHING when the camera is on him, but when the camera's off and the room's quiet, he's back down on his knees giving blowjobs to the Ben Ladn family.

It's called 'loyalty,' given how many times the Ben Ladn family pulled HIM out of the shit (read Fortunate Son).

His loyalty doesn't actually extend to the American public, the Constitution, or America itself, for that matter.

It's good he got the dog -- at least there's SOME creature in the White House with a sense of loyalty.

No impeachment.
Turn him over to the World Court for War Crimes. See if he'll get up as high as Tojo did.

Link

Bush: Hamas Jeopardizes Palestinian State

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By TERENCE HUNT AP White House Correspondent

February 01,2006 | NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- President Bush said Wednesday the vision of a Palestinian state cannot be realized if a Hamas-led government refuses to renounce its desire to destroy Israel. He also said Iran can have nuclear power but not a nuclear weapon.

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Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Mrs. King, Lincoln, Clinton --
none of those people or those people in those countries would piss on him if he were on fire.

Perhaps the problem is that our less-than-literate president (a very traditional attitude among some -- "Hey I'm ignorant as pig shit and dern proud of it, too.") doesn't know the difference between using the presidency as a BULLY PULPIT and using the presidency to JUST BE A BULLY.

Like BULLIES everywhere, he thinks people respect him for his thuggishness.

They didn't elect him to run THEIR countries or to make them work the way HE and his fundie Christers want..

WE didn't elect him either, but the people HE (and his henchmen) paid off did the job THEY were paid for -- and put him in office

But HE isn't doing the job HE'S being paid for ... if he were being paid to ask you if you wanted fries with that, he'd have been fired after a week.

He's always been a bully, backed up by daddy's money, but the true Bush is the man we saw who froze for 7 minutes on 9-11 faced with a situation daddy and his friends couldn't buy him out of.

Perhaps that's why he keeps on and on and on about 9-11 -- because that was his acid test and he failed it and it haunts him -- not that those people died so horribly, but that the whole world saw him for the phony little punkass he really is.