Saintperle

3/30/09

Cheney -- denial is pathetic -- sedition is felonious

Systematically sequential actions and/or statements made with the intention of undercutting or diminishing the legal authority of the government is called SEDITION.

And it's a Federal Crime -- a felony.

I feel for his hideous nightmarish terror at facing what he did for power and what he became and that it was all vanity and a failed grim joke.

But that doesn't give him a pass to try to overthrow the president who was actually elected by the majority of voters.

President Obama -- you don't have to investigate to prove he actually did what he bragged about -- tortured prisoners -- he's committing a felony right now out in the open.

Let him see what life in a Federal Prison is like for an old guy who thinks he's tough.

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3/24/09

Most important thing about this photo -- check the date

Little did they know

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3/22/09

Not so far off as some people believe


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Key specifications for the Tesla Roadster electric car

DIMENSIONS:

WHEELBASE: 92.6 inches

LENGTH: 155.4 inches

WIDTH: 72.9 inches

HEIGHT: 44.4 inches

FRONT HEADROOM: 36.7 inches

FRONT SHOULDER ROOM: 26 inches

LEGROOM: 42 inches

FUEL ECONOMY/PERFORMANCE:

RANGE: About 220 miles per charge, based on an EPA combined city-highway estimate

WEIGHT: 2,700 pounds

ACCELERATION (0-60 mph): 3.9 seconds

MAXIMUM SPEED: 125 mph, electronically limited

BATTERY TYPE: Lithium-ion, consisting of 6,831 individual cells

BATTERY LIFE: Five years or 100,000 miles

POWERTRAIN:

MOTOR: 375 volt AC induction air-cooled electric motor

HORSEPOWER: 248 at 5,000 to 8,000 rpm

POWER: 185 kilowatts at 5,000 to 8,000 rpm

MAXIMUM RPM: 14,000

TORQUE: 276 pound-feet

TRANSMISSION: Single-speed fixed gear with electrically actuated parking lock mechanism and mechanical lubrication pump

Source: Tesla Motors



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A comment made many years ago

But is still applicable today, to ANY of the people who are speaking as if they're capable of analyzing the current economic crisis or those who are either attacking or defending OR analyzing the government attempts to pull us out of it.

Pretty much applicable to ANYONE who pretends to knowing what the hell is going on -- whether economically, socially, politically, etc:

"That man is trying to work his way up to becoming a horse's ass ...
but he hasn't got what it takes."


The Late Howard Luck Gossage

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He's a Socialist? He's a Communist? Do any of the finger pointers know what the %##??//% they're talking about?

Historically, socialism, as labelled by the public, seems to be whatever people say it is, almost always, people who have no idea what it is, but what those people imagine it is.

And the people who call themselves Capitalists -- those who, today, we might call Wall Street types, have been screaming about it, also without a clue as to WHAT it is, seemingly throughout history.

A relevant tangent begins here:

I grew up in Philadelphia where the American Revolution was still alive in the red brick of most of the buildings. It seemed as if every second or third institution -- from the Free Library to the University of Pennsylvania -- had a plaque which read "Founded by Benjamin Franklin..." and then gave the specific date. So it wasn't unusual that Tom Paine was one of my historical childhood heroes. (Actually, he still is -- The Age of Reason reads as if it were written last week to point directly at the people who regard any "wall" between church and state as agents of communism)

Tom Paine -- the man who financed much of the revolution with all of his royalties from Common Sense (and they were substantial), the man who gave us the name for this new thing that was to be -- The United States of America , the man who published The Crisis* on December 23, 1776 and convinced/inspired/shamed the freezing, starving soldiers at Valley Forge into staying on beyond December 31, when their contracts of service expired. (No "Stop-Loss" bullshit in those days.)

But when, as a grammar school tyke, I gave a report on Tom Paine, and was stopped partway through by an elderly teacher who shouted at me: "Tom Paine was a COMMUNIST!" I was labelled a smartass by responding with a completely sincere and spontaneous "But that's impossible. It hadn't even been invented yet." (In later years, I learned he was what we call an "Agrarian Socialist" when we look at early 20th century Midwest Heartland America, but the way it was said to me back then was very definitely that he was some sort of Party Official or KGB agent.) Which brings us around to come back down to where we began -- what IS socialism?

In 1928 George Bernard Shaw wrote a witty and educated book titled: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. (You can read 300+ pages of it at the site above -- and if reading an entire book online doesn't appeal to you, there are plenty of copies around, paperback used ones starting at around a dollar and going up from there. You can do a search on ADDALL and you'll find more than 500 copies being offered by various booksellers).

One of the items in it that comes to mind, since I can't find my copy, that back then, the idea of free intercity roads -- roads that WERE NOT privately owned, roads that were built by the government and did NOT demand a fee from travelers -- in 1928 that was the hideous specter of rampant socialism.

So -- Marxists and Socialists and Communists and Capitalists -- protean terms that -- while each HAS meaning -- generally mean whatever the person saying them wants them to mean.

One example:

In the 50's and 60's, "profit-sharing" was denounced as COMMUNISM by those who -- literally, not judgmentally -- didn't want to share.

In the 90's, I had a business supplied by a privately-owned company in Shanghai. When touring the plant and the sights around town, the President of the company pointed to some employees, and said -- quite proudly -- "We have profit-sharing." When I asked how that was working out, I was told: "Well, the government allows it but they don't like it -- they denounce it as CAPITALISM."


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The Crisis

*"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman..."

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3/17/09

Delightful in a gentle way (the sharp edges and thorns are below the surface)

Deficient in a mental way --- that's me -- I put the wrong link, up there in the title.

That's his home page, which is also fine indeed,

but what I WANTED to show you is his Twitter page

My thanks to the quick-witted and ever-fascinating Batfrau.

She caught the mistake and was nice enough to tell me.

More embarrassing because she was the one who steered me to Bearskinrug in the first place -- so I appreciate how tactful she was offering the correction.

Thanks, Batfrau.

Link
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Dick Cheney? To paraphrase the words of Lee Marvin in "Dirty Dozen..."

Poor little Dick Cheney, those bad bad men in the White House actually threw back the feces you threw at them from your cage.

"Why Richard -- I didn't realize you were so...SENSITIVE"

Well, I guess, new administration -- disillusionment.
I have long held admiration and respect for Chuck Todd -- so much for that.

I guess, other than Helen Thomas, the lure of playing the stupid White House Press Corps game is overwhelming.

Robert Gibbs was out of line when he made a joke about the former Vice President?

Dick Cheney -- the most vicious, vitriolic, venomous sonofabitch to occupy that office? The creepazoid who hid out under a rock for 8 years, planning assassinations and tortures? THAT Dick Cheney?

Oh me oh my. But the criminal behavior was mild-mannered Robert Gibbs answering his seditious attempts to discredit the president. After Little Dick called the new prez a liar, called him a man who will get us all killed, the BAD GUY is not the cave dweller who just can't deal with not having power (something about having to spend time with himself and finding it all empty and/or rotted inside)-- the bad guy is the fellow who responded with a bit of mild sarcasm?

"Why Scott -- I didn't realize you were so ...SENSITIVE"


Does being a reporter instead of an analyst mean he can't remind us that Cheney's venal insanity ("Well we achieved what we set out to do in Iraq.") is just getting worse.

Or in the words of James Joyce in Ulysses: "Crazy as a shithouse rat." -- Yeah, I know the original quote was "CUTE as a shithouse rat," but I prefer the usage of my old D.I. as I can't bring myself to even imply there's anything cute about that vile waste of protoplasm. (And I have found rats to be much more congenial and benign than that man.)

The White House press corps disease is the same as that of most of the people on the other side of the microphone -- an addiction to money and authority and access to SECRETS.

But as to Cheney going on and on and on still squirting out all the vitriol and venom remaining in him, it looks to me like -- to get mythical or religious for a moment -- Hell is for believers, and anyone who has spent as much time as he has pretending to be some bizarre version of a Christian (if you can fit scrambling for power, wealth, authorizing theft and murder and torture and sowing hatred into being a Christian) -- as if this make-believe Christian sold his soul for all that, and looks like he's terrified now that it's over, terrified by who's going to be coming to dinner with the check.

For Chuck Todd to even allow Cheney's monstrous pop-up presence to be a topic of ANY matter and to do a herd-mentality corporate slam on the man who actually gave the perfectly right response, is seriously saddening.

Cheney is as relevant to matters of importance as Anne Coulter.

And oh -- not as if the Bush-league players never ran to the front of their cages to throw feces at former VP's:

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October 3, 2002

"America's economy is in big trouble and I'm worried our current approach is failing us,'' Gore said Wednesday at the Brookings Institution. He said Bush is lost in an economic wilderness, "racing in the wrong direction'' while critical domestic issues are drowned out by international affairs in the final weeks of the midterm campaign.

Gore... said the president should focus as intently on the faltering economy as he has on foreign affairs.

Ari Fleischer replied: "I don't know that any answer is necessary or any rebuttal is necessary. Nobody pays a lot of attention to what the former vice president said. The president is focused on the economic policies that will help create jobs and the best way to create jobs in the president's opinion is for terrorism insurance to be passed so 300,000 jobs can be created right away.''


--------------------------------
Right, and then...
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In his new book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore wrote that Bush’s efforts to connect Iraq to 9/11 were an example of the administration’s willful “deception” of the public..

This afternoon, White House press secretary Tony Snow took issue with this passage. “[Bush] has never tried to make” the connection between Iraq and 9/11, Snow said. “And what [Gore] is doing, it’s been tried by a lot of other people, which is to take something the president hasn’t said, expose it as a, quote, lie, and then beat him up for it. … The president’s been straight about the intel.”

Snow attacked Gore’s book, saying, “I don’t know if they’re going to do a reprinting of the book to try to get the facts straight. The fact-checkers may have to take a look at it.”

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Finally ....
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January 17, 2006

White House: Al Gore is a Hypocrite


The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval...

Gore, in a speech Monday, called for an independent investigation of the administration program that he says broke the law by listening in - without warrants - on Americans suspected of talking with terrorists abroad.

Gore called the program, authorized by President Bush, "a threat to the very structure of our government" and charged that the administration acted without congressional authority and made a "direct assault" on a federal court set up to authorize requests to eavesdrop on Americans.

"I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds," McClellan said of Gore.


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And the best part?

In years, Gibbs was the first press secretary who actually delivered a sarcastic and humorous line really well.

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3/15/09

Situations come and go and the faces and names change, but the national views remain depressingly the same

The UK wants to establish a world-wide canon of ethics for financial institutions, because they can't think any way but what you do when you own all the pink parts on the map.

The USA wants to go abroad and kick ass so we won't have to be afraid of the injuns, headhunters, and fierce salvages.

The French want to gift us with their stated involvement in the rest of the world.

The Germans, well, they want to take over.

There's an old saw I first heard on London 30-some years ago. It was about tourists and it went like this:

The English Act as if they own everything.
The Germans act as if they want to own everything.
And the Americans don't care who owns anything.

And all three seem horrified to find the people they colonized coming back to the motherland, whether legally or not (In England -- the Irish, Pakistanis, Indians, etc ... in Germany, the Turks ... in the USA, Spanish-speaking people, Asian people, African people.)

And all three are more and more horrified when those people appreciate the opportunities more and study harder, work harder, get better grades, and get jobs that pay more money.

And the kind of people we associate with those three countries (or rather, the kind of people these countries traditionally associate with their own countries) they all piss and moan and whine about how it's wrooong, that we're WHITE people and it's just wrooong and it means the end of the world when those darker-skinned fellows prove to be better at the game than old Jeb and Bubba and Lamar and Junior, the folks who are still trying to rule the world using the worn-out magical mantra: "My daddy said...".

Want a good wine from the Old South?

"They're giving THEM all the special privileges, all the special rights, letting THEM vote and get married and get welfare...")

(And not ALL the people in the South, either -- many don't fit this mass generalization at all, while a whole lot of yankees do.)

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3/11/09

A couple of things to remember

1. The "Earmarksalot" stimulus bill currently being fought over --- corporately-employed journalists* may have to preface their remarks with "I can't say whether this was intentional or not," but I don't:

When President Obama repeats that he inherited the bill, he's not saying he CAN'T delete the earmarks, or even that he's preoccupied with other matters.

He's being diplomatic since he knows -- as I do, having heard Repugnican ops last September boast about what they were doing -- larding the bill (that was months late) with all sorts of special payoffs (9,000 of them if the red-faced bloviators are to be believed) so that Obama would have to veto them, thereby pissing off millions of voters, who Repug senators and congressmen would would tell their constituents: "Hey you - you lost your job and your home because that big city socialist Obama cut out the funds for the new sky-diving school and replaced it with 12 acres for growing watermelons...."

2. After less than 2 months in office, the opposition is screaming "FAILURE!"
They seem to forget -- as they have for years -- that Monkey Boy had been president for 8 months before September 11, 2001 -- AND had the benefit of the Hart-Rudman Report which strongly advised creating a central intelligence bureau called something like Homeland Security BECAUSE of likely imminent attacks by religious crazies of the Islamic persuasion on American Cities. (The ignoring of the August report has been well-covered.)

3. And oh, while we're on the subject of redacting history -- EVERYONE IN THE WORLD believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- not just us."

Except that Hans Blix -- the actual, trained, experienced full-time inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Scott Ritter, Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector In Iraq BOTH said "Ain't no WMD's in Iraq, NONE. (I remember Dennis Miller mocking Scott Ritter and the careful way he made statements on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect TV show.
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*"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

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**It's sort of the equivalent of the late great Senator Everett Dirksen, he of the curly tousled white topknot and the voice that was described as akin to the "white froth on the top of a bucket of fresh milk straight from the cow," when he told his staff to spread the rumor that his opponent in the upcoming election was having sex with farm animals. When his aides said "But that's not true," Dirksen said "I know, but let's make the sonofabitch deny it." In this instance it's "I know my earmark is bullshit, but let's make the Darky cancel it." (Oh don't tell me there's no racism playing around the attacks on this presidency.)

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---Additional links to who-knew-what in 2002 about WMD's:

Common Dreams -- article by Scott Ritter

CNN's Hatchet Job on Scott Ritter


and

Dick Cheney STILL refusing to admit (in December 2008) that there were people, people in positions to know, saying it -- over and over again and right out in public -- saying that Saddam Hussein did NOT have WMD's -- Cheney saying there was no available intelligence to say Saddam Hussein DIDN'T have them. (Except of course, for the people whose job it was to give us reports on that fact -- that there weren't any there.)

Hans Blix in interview with Christiane Amanpour on the refusal of the Bush-league to accept the actual intelligence reports on WMDs

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3/10/09

Concerning Rush Limbaugh

In the words of the late and still sorely missed Howard Luck Gossage:

"That man is trying to work his way
up to being a horse's ass...
But he hasn't got what it takes."

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3/9/09

Three reasons to keep Rush Limbaugh in the spotlight:

People keep saying "Oh don't talk about Rush -- it just makes him bigger."

Actually that's one of the reasons I think it's a good thing to do.

Here's why:

Three reasons to keep Rush Limbaugh in the spotlight:

1. Of course all this attention makes him bigger -- I look forward to see him enacting the fable about the frog that blew himself up, trying to show off how big he was.

2. The more the public sees of Rush, the more unwholesome revoltingness they will see -- come on -- we all saw that clip from the CPAC with him doing strange wigglings of his snout, wobbling his lips and cheeks and bouncing up and down -- he was making necessary adjustments to maintain the appearance of being human, since he was out in public and the glamour was wearing off and he risked us seeing his actual form which would have had EVERYONE turning running screaming from the repellent actuality of it.

3. PLEASE -- Do NOT call him a whore of any sort -- I hate the way people use that term so loosely -- it's insulting when people do -- insulting to actual on-the-street hard-working whores. A long time ago I read an article about hooking, and there was a comment in it from one of the interviews with a working girl, a comment I never forgot. She said:

"We're not selling anything that doesn't belong to us. And there isn't a politician or businessman who can make that same statement."

Rush and the rest of them are selling our world out from under us, spewing hatred to morons to feed their own addictions, not caring what sort of monstrous effects that may have, what horrifyingly stupid things those morons will do -- and frankly, people like Limbaugh all seem to me to be one humongous waste of protoplasm.

The only thing Limbaugh has to sell that's his own is asscheek steaks -- if his corpus weren't so toxic and corrupted, there might be a lot of good eating on that fat ass, a lot of good marbling on the meat.

Probably would take more marinating than it's worth, though, to leach out the toxic waste.

Better just chop it into chunks and feed it to the other hogs.

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3/7/09

So wow -- I figured congress is REALLY getting wild...

I turned on the news and the first thing I saw was --- HUH? Terry Jones addressing congress?




Nahhh -- just Gordon Brown addressing congress and proving the fear of him not being able to throw bullshit and blowjobs as easily as Tony Blair did was not justified.

Gordon Brown David Beckham picture 1742648


assassins2
TERRY JONES




U.S. President Barack Obama listens to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (L) during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, March 3, 2009. Brown will press Obama for details on his plans to fix the ailing U.S. financial sector in talks on Tuesday that will focus on the global economic crisis. From Reuters Pictures by Reuters.

Terry Jones asking Prez Obama for financing for his new movie?

Ahhh, no, now I remember -- politics is show business for ugly people...

But, DAMN -- Terry Jones addressing congress would be a lot more interesting... might even get a ride from the airport (which PM Brown DIDN'T get)


http://urbanfrontiersman.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/terry_jones_portrait.jpg



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Thanks to Jolly Roger and the folks at Reconstitution

Oxy Moron's Favorite Pastime

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3/3/09

Only one answer to "I WANT THE PRESIDENT TO FAIL!"

Same one FINALLY given to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy after all the little craven asskissers were afraid to say anything (pretty much same thing today) and that is:

AT LONG LAST, SIR --
HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY?

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Remember how people laughed when the newly-elected W said "A dictatorship wouldn't be so bad ... if I could be dictator..."

Fuckanoodle -- the sonofabitch wasn't joking:



This from Glenn Greenwald's column:

The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration


"Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." It was sent to (and requested by) Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes and authored by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and DOJ Special Counsel Robert Delahunty. ... it was the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several months George Bush before left office (October, 2008), when OLC Chief Stephen Bradbury abruptly issued a memo withdrawing, denouncing and repudiating both its reasoning and conclusions.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

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In other words, that fuzzy-headed asshole had his slaveys give him the power to eavesdrop on, kidnap, imprison, torture, etc ANYONE - U.S. Citizen or not -- that he THOUGHT had something to do with the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001.

And as we all remember, Monkey Boy himself made the definition clear, that we were either WITH HIM or we were enemies of the state.

So it is with some sense of judicial moderation my hope for that Frat-boy prick and all those who helped him to establish that authority (since we may never know how many people WERE taken under that power) and everyone else who said "OK," and that includes members of congress, Republican, Democrat, and Independent, and Laura -- sorry honey -- you took the ride, you pay for the ticket -- they they may all live out their lives suffering the torments of the damned every minute of every hour of every day. That they know that for the rest of their lives, every piece of paper, every recovered email, every bit of testimony from every person they ever knew will point at them wordlessly screaming, like Donald Sutherland in the last scene of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

That way, while Obama and his people work late trying to figure out how to clean up the mess and rot left from the greed and fear that goes all the way to Nixon's administration, the rest of us can watch the lions take down the goddamned Christian-manque monsters of the Bush-league, watch and laugh as they are torn apart the media coliseum and laugh when they scream in protest that they "were only doing what was right".

Wow -- THAT'S REALITY ENTERTAINMENT.

(Oh, and if there's any way to include Rush Limbaugh in that "this-way-to-your-grave" lineup, please do. After all, he was one of the ones who so loved his own inhumanity that his gave up his only forgotten soul to grow bigger and bigger and give us dire warnings as if he were the arbiter of it, that criticizing ANYTHING the Bush-wah thugs did was tantamount to treason. Strip him naked and let the Democrats throw sharp pointed things at him until they, too, have to answer for THEIR part -- silence, the man said in my Quaker-oriented hometown of Philadelphia, SILENCE CONNOTES ASSENT)

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