Saintperle

2/28/08

As if this is a surprise ---



Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail
By Dan Froomkin
The Washington Post

Wednesday 27 February 2008

The Bush White House has made a mockery of the Presidential Records Act and its requirement that official White House records - including e-mails - be preserved for posterity.

At a congressional hearing yesterday, it became clear for the first time that top White House officials knowingly adopted a new e-mail system in 2002 that was riddled with technical problems that not only risked data loss but could easily be exploited by those who wished to keep their e-mails from public scrutiny. We've known for a while that a lot of White House e-mails, by some accounts numbering in the millions, are missing and have possibly been erased. Yesterday's discovery raises the question of whether that happened by accident - or by design. And the White House's unhurried approach to addressing the problem is hardly reassuring...

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Well, the Bush White House has made a mockery of more than that -- of the Constitution and the rule of law. Clinton hated the press. Bush-Cheney hate the idea that there are other sections of government that can question the spoiled-brat rich kid's "It's MINE!! It's MINE!!

Not much we can do about it now, except I will pass this idea along -- to any entrepreneur who want to make a lots of money quite quickly, you're free to use it or any adaptation (to my knowledge this is the first time it's been published (even though I'm CERTAIN I'm not the first one to think about it.)

But we CAN create a fitting monument to this administration:

Urinals with Bush's face on the bottom, his mouth printed around the drain.

Better yet, both faces, Bush AND Cheney, united forever (some experts say that hundreds - even thousands - of years from now, the only thing archaeologists will find of our civilization will be toilets, which will not decay or collapse).

A fitting memorial to both of them.

Same could be done with sit-down toilets for defecational purposes, and also for equal opportunity to allow vaginal-Americans to join in the urinary fun.

Get up when finished and look back, watch it flush down his throat, remember that shit-eating grin of Monkey Boy and Cheney and recall their administration for what it was.


Works for me.


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2/27/08

Nothing really changes...

"The biggest business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety ... Logically extended, this process can only terminate in a mass nervous breakdown or in a collective condition of resentment..."

Eric Severeid (Quoted in Organ Magazine, 1971)

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2/25/08

McCain lets a little bit of the fact that it may all be bullshit slip

Feb 25th, 2008 | ROCKY RIVER, Ohio -- John McCain says to win the White House he must convince the country that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't, he says, "then I lose. I lose."

He quickly backed off that remark...

... If I may, I'd like to retract 'I'll lose,'" he said.

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Hell no.

This is the 21st Century, old man.

No one's been able to retract ANYTHING since Nixon made the tapes...

So I guess you tipped your mitt, eh Johnny?

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WAR: What is it good for?

(--other than making SOME people very very rich)


"War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose;
then one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost."

Karl Kraus 1874-1936


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"How is the world ruled
and how do wars start?
Diplomats tell lies to journalists
and then believe what they read."

Karl Kraus 1874 - 1936



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"There are only two things we should fight for:
One is the defense of our homes
and the other is the Bill of Rights.
War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC,
twice awarded Congressional Medal of Honor.



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"Patriotism is the religion of hell."
James Branch Cabell

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2/22/08

Re: Entrepreneurial (i.e., Undocumented) Immigration, NAFTA, and such


A thought in retrospect (and with a tip of the hat to Chuck Dupree whose comments generated it)

There is one aspect of this mess NO ONE seems to be saying regarding two supposedly separate issues -- but how both non-documented immigration and NAFTA are costing US jobs. (Although, as the Outrageously funny Doug Stanhope puts it: "Here's a guy without shoes half the time, can't read or write much of the time, walks -- WALKS -- a thousand miles half the time crawling on his hands and knees to get across our southern border. And if THAT GUY can take YOUR job away from you, then fuck you. You don't deserve a job." Or words to that effect.)

Everyone remembers Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound of jobs going south." And that's true as far as it goes as more and more American (or Japanese businesses in America) companies move to Mexico.

The corollary and result so few ever mention is that NAFTA is ALSO responsible for the tremendous increase of illegal immigration into the US, because it actually LOWERED salaries in southern Mexico making it damn near impossible to keep a family together even with a decent job. And of course, the insistence on the USA to use corn for biofuel instead of cellulose (stems and leaves) making the price of what is the staple food in Mexico (and other Meso-American areas) rise faster than oil prices.

So thanks, Bill and Hillary.

I still say the president who did the most for the world was Jimmy Carter -- in 4 short years he caused (or allowed) BOTH the Shah of Iran and the Nicaraguan El Monstro Somoza to be deposed (and later blown up) --- more long-term really good stuff than any other prez in the 20th century.


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2/21/08

Doesn't congress have anything better to do?

Are there REALLY no more pressing and/or important matters to attend to in our United States than if and when some jocks took drugs that made them better (instead of the drugs they always rail against, the ones that "give you the skill but take away the will")?

With motivations that range from jock-sniffing adulation to athletically inept resentment, these assholes (the congress, not the jocks), are not really doing the job we hired them for.

Even a consummate comb-over asshole like Donald Trump knows those two words: "You're Fired."

Republican or Democrat, I propose we use those two words and vote every person on those panels out of office, whether we like them or their party or not.

And tell the next group to TCB or get the fuck out.

(Can we sue or prosecute the current ones for defrauding us?
Taking money under false pretenses?)

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A new face for American diplomacy

I agree with an article in the NYTimes I read recently, that there is never any real way to predict what sort of president anyone will make before he or she moves into the oval office.

But this is why my choice comes down firmly on the side of Barack Obama -- not what he will do, necessarily, but what he is and what THAT will do.

From Salon.com

Barack Obama is perceived by Muslims abroad like no other candidate. He would begin a presidency with tremendous potential to heal U.S. relations with much of the world.

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Article by By Hooman Majd

Feb. 21, 2008

| When I was in Tehran, Iran, a year ago, I was asked by several senior government officials, including former President Mohammad Khatami, what to make of Barack Obama's candidacy for president of the United States. The young senator from Illinois was still barely on the international radar then. My response was that I couldn't see Americans nominating, let alone electing, a black man whose middle name was Hussein. My answer, clearly wrong in hindsight, stirred smiles and raised eyebrows among the Iranian leaders because they'd had no idea that Obama had a Muslim father. Even more surprising to them was that he carried, apparently without shame, a Muslim name. From Khatami this elicited an "Ajab!" -- Farsi for, essentially, "You've got to be kidding!" There were also many nods of agreement with my conclusion about Obama's chances.

At this point in the presidential race, although it is deeply heartening that I was so wrong in my judgment of American voters, Obama's great potential to connect with the Muslim world, and to change how Muslims perceive the United States, is conspicuously absent from our national debate. A crucial question about who should be the next president is whether Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain is most likely to be able to heal the rift between the U.S. and much of the rest of the world, a rift not created but dangerously widened by the administration of George W. Bush. What is abundantly clear now -- at least to many foreigners and particularly to Muslims in the Third World -- is that Barack Obama is the candidate by far the best suited to begin healing that rift and restoring America's global reputation, and perhaps even to begin reversing decades of anti-Americanism. Obama would begin a presidency with a huge advantage in terms of world perception...

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Sure would be a way to tell the world that the American population has turned away from the era of the self-serving treasury-plundering short-sighted provincial rednecks, that it's over. And that it would be a lot easier than rounding them up -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et al, -- and turning them over to the World Court to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity.

Although maybe we could still do that, too.

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Spielberg Drops Out as Adviser to Beijing Olympics in Dispute Over Darfur Conflict





Published: February 13, 2008

WASHINGTON — Steven Spielberg said Tuesday that he was withdrawing as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, after almost a year of trying unsuccessfully to prod President Hu Jintao of China to do more to try to end Sudan’s attacks in the Darfur region.

Mr. Spielberg’s decision, and the public way he announced it, is a blow to China, which has said that its relationship with Sudan should not be linked to the Olympics, which have become a source of national pride.

In a statement sent to the Chinese ambassador and the Beijing Olympic committee on Tuesday, Mr. Spielberg said that his “conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual.”

“Sudan’s government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these ongoing crimes but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more to end the continuing human suffering there,” the statement said. “China’s economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change.”

Responding to Mr. Spielberg’s action, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington said, “As the Darfur issue is neither an internal issue of China nor is it caused by China, it is completely unreasonable, irresponsible and unfair to link the two as one.”

Mr. Spielberg had written to Mr. Hu about Darfur twice in the past 10 months, his spokesman said, taking China to task for its “silence” while Sudan blocked the deployment of international peacekeepers and expelled aid workers from the region.

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OH MY GOD!! You mean the President of China DARED to ignore a phone call from Stevie Spielberg? Had the TEMERITY to not return the call? As if he thought HIS responsibility for a billion-plus Chinese was somehow more pressing and important than jerking off the public ego of some movie-maker. How dare he?

Hey, Steve -- you make movies, entertainments, and when you do one that has weight to it, like Schindler's List, you somehow forget to give credit at the Academy Awards to Thomas Kenneally, the man who wrote the book you made a movie from. All you seemed to care about that time was that everyone receiving an award paused to kiss your ring on the way to the stage. If it weren't for the writer's thank-you's when receiving an award, Mr. Kenneally's name wouldn't have been mentioned at all.

But ok -- why shouldn't a guy who makes science fiction movies move up to trying to tell a billion people what course of international political action they should take? After all, his clout worked well enough forcing out all the other ideas than his own being done by other people in the Shoah Project.

Talk about the frog who blew himself up.

But we had to know it was coming when he went back to E.T. and changed the guns in the FBI agents' hands to walkie-talkies, so as not to cast any aspersions on the power elite.

And hey -- don't so many of the people HE PAYS talk about what a wonderful guy he is? So he must be, right?

So my suspicions that this is merely a politically correct way of getting out of a committment he made must be wrong.

His place in history is assured -- as Number One (or close to it) on the list of incredibly tiresome persons.



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2/12/08

I am amazed how the American people allow the totally fear-driven acts of mass murder

"There are only two things we should fight for:
One is the defense of our homes
and the other is the Bill of Rights.
War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC



Is there ANY question that this war is a racket? A racket designed to pay off the people who bought and sold the presidency to these creatures who have no morals, no compassion, no respect for God nor Man.

The idea that it's OK for these people to kill thousands and thousand of people, wound millions and make millions homeless, and monstrous to even consider voting their replacements into office, people who think it's just peachy to continue the wholesale killing of Americans and Iraqis.

Everyone says what a fine man John McCain is. Well, as far as I can see, he did something braver than almost anyone (including me) could have done -- 40 years ago. But he's ok with killing lots of people.

Hillary Clinton, too, like McCain, voted to kill lots of people for some ideal or other.

Huckabee wasn't there to vote, but he tell us how he's so fucking Christian -- and he is where the poor and the homeless are concerned -- that he only seems to have no moral sense where the commandment not to kill is concerned. At least not when they're Muslim. He's the worst of the lot, since he has been a Christ professional and obviously doesn't understand a goddamn word that Jesus said .

We're really better of without Giuliani or Romney remaining in contention -- their slavering desires to kill more and more Muslims was obscene, but perhaps that's why people in New York were calling Mayor G "Hitler" by the end of his term.

Obama and Ron Paul are the only ones who actually seem to have a moral compass, whether or not you like the policies of one or another -- it's just interesting to note that the military people in Iraq -- the ones who see carnage and pain and bodies blown apart on a daily basis -- that the presidential cash contributions those people make are overwhelmingly to Ron Paul and Barack Obama. What does that tell you about the opinion of the people who actually know what's going on and aren't reaping huge profits from it?

This isn't a brand new concept. Perhaps it's just that there aren't any video games (virtual, i.e., imitation realities) that think shooting and killing aren't the best way to resolve one's fears of the boogie man coming out of the closet (in more than one meaning of that last phrase).


"War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose;
then one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost."
Karl Kraus 1874-1936



A lot of people have known this for a long time, and a lot of people never learned it, or at least took too long a time to learn it -- hell, when I was being drafted long long time ago, I opted to join the Marines, so I can't claim I always understood this issue.


"Patriotism is the religion of hell."
James Branch Cabell


Not just because of the carnage, but because patriotism also presents itself as a virtue.


"How is the world ruled
and how do wars start?
Diplomats tell lies to journalists
and then believe what they read."
Karl Kraus 1874 - 1936




Well, we know about that yellow cake, aluminum tube, Gulf of Tonkin, U.S.S Maine bullshit, don't we?


“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president,
or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong,
is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt



And that may be so, BUT --

"It is dangerous to be right when your government is wrong."
Voltaire


and

"Any man who calls things by their rightful name will surely be hanged."
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester




But perhaps it's as simple as this:


"It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair


But it goes all the way back and those Think Tank assholes who have read all the Federalist Papers and seem to know so much about the founding of the United States always seem to overlook this very famous comment:


I hope... that Mankind will at length,
as they call themselves reasonable Creatures,
have Reason and Sense enough to settle their
Differences without cutting Throats:
For in my Opinion:
there never was a good War,
or a bad Peace."
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to
Sir Joseph Banks, Passy, July 27, 1783




But the loss of reason and sense is not anything out of the ordinary when big tough men and big tough women get scared:


"The first casualty of war is not truth, but perspective.
Once that's gone, truth, like compassion, reason,
and all the other virtues, wanders around like a wounded orphan."
Ente Grillenhaft -- "Treatise on Reason and Hysteria"



They keep quoting the Pottery Barn credo ("If you broke it you bought it,") as if that were applicable, when all it is is a justification of keeping on plundering and killing -- ahh, boys and their toys. But that's not what's going on here. What's going on is the Humpty Dumpty Credo:

"If you break it, all the king's horses
and all the king's men can't put it back together again."


That's what the "quitters" know and what the veterans know -- how do you get out? You just leave -- and accept that the people left there to clean up will curse the names of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Clinton and McCain and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and even the late and usually wonderful Tom Lantos and all the rest until the end of time for having done this to them.

I can not vote for anyone who votes so causally to start a war against people who did nothing to us but have oil and a good location for military bases.

Even less can I vote for anyone whose judgment is so poor as to have EVER thought that George W Bush was ever willing to even KNOW the truth about anything let alone tell it.

Anyone who could have EVER thought that Dick Cheney was anything but the beast that lives in the dank basements of H.P. Lovecraft's stories and the reason he's out of public view so often is because of the immense amount of energy it takes him to assume human form.

It comes down to this -- is it ok to kill thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people for pride or profit?

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2/9/08

Mitt Romney -- couldn't carry Ronald Reagan's jockstrap - -as much as he might want to

Yeah, Mitt Romney the animatronic version of the Undead Vril, has gracelessly backed out, preferring to think that the incredible distaste warm-blooded humans have for the prospect of that creature in power will result in a situation more like that of Ronald Reagan coming back from his 1976 loss of the nomination.

Hey -- it ain't Reagan-esque to give a nasty graceless grudging farewell saying that he quit because he didn't want to risk Islamo-fascist sympathizing traitors (i.e., Democrats) winning the presidency. Even Richard Nixon had more grace than that.

But coming back the way Reagan did?
Not a chance in hell.
Ronald Reagan was not a vicious, unlovely self-serving cunt hiding behind a movable panoply of opportunistic beliefs.
Mitt Romney is.

It has nothing to do with him being Mormon -- only an Evangelical fundamentalist might consider LDS to be a more bizarre set of religious beliefs than his own. To the rest of us, why would we think being Mormon any more insane than being Roman Catholic? Or Baptist? Or a convert to Orthodox Judaism?

Besides, I have known a lot of Mormons and, in general, they're just people like anyone else. The only thing that disturbs me is not the religious belief but their sense of community, specifically the sense that the ONLY community that counts is THEIRS.

Reagan was semi-senile, but likeable... and he liked people. His presence was more Mike Huckabee than Mitt Romney, who we always know is masking his total contempt for people behind that artificial smile, hiding his unwholesome corruption from the people who, he knows, would tear him limb from limb if they could but see what a non-human monster he really is. Even when Reagan was inarticulate or what we might have thought wrong-headed, we could see he wished well for all of us. But even when Romney is VERY articulate, it still shows through that Romney despises us all and wishes evil to anyone not of his ilk.

Plus the fact that he's just one more rich kid yammering on about how poor people shouldn't be helped by the government because it undercuts their motive to succeed. Hey Mitt -- you and Monkey Boy can have a nice long talk in the outer darkness about how we ingrates just don't understand how difficult it is to be the son of a wealthy powerful man who can give you anything you want -- money, education, power...

Romney seems to be a cleaned-up version of someone as vicious and paranoid as Richard Nixon, but not nearly as intelligent nor as dedicated to the well-being of the all the people of the United States. (Let no Republicans forget that it was Richard Nixon who added quotas to the Affirmative Action Program - -The Philadelphia Plan -- a well-meaning if clumsy and self-defeating way to try to guarantee fairness across the board.)

So, Mitt, now that your boys don't have you to push around any more (in service to the America that needs your slime so desperately) they're free to join the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines and do daddy's bidding and go fight the holy war daddy so much wanted other people's kids to fight.

Hey Mitt -- don't let the door of history hit you in the ass on your way out of public view.

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2/7/08

Ahh, oh! THAT election -- a thought on politicians

In the words of the late, lovely, and lamented Arlen Riley Wilson (16 July 1925 - 22 May 1999), as regards politicians:

THE SCUM RISES TO THE TOP


And it really doesn't matter if it's Republican, Democrat, Independent, Peace & Freedom, Green, American Independent or what: When the rubber hits the road, it's all

"Me! Me! Me!
(But I'm only doing this for you, you you.)"

And to quote the old sex-mad college fraternity drinking song --
in this instance with with another meaning:


"Fuck 'em all -- the long and the short and the tall."


There's a lot of pretentious self-righteous bullshit out there, people who say

"If you don't vote, you can't complain."

But they're wrong -- it's just the opposite.
Only those who DIDN'T vote have a right to complain.

Anyone who does vote -- or did -- well hell, you're just as much to blame as they are for encouraging them ...





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