"Believe It or Not, I'm Walking on Air..."

Stephen Colbert once opened "The Colbert Report" with: "I swallowed 20 condoms full of Truth and I’m about to smuggle them across the border." Well, Colbert delivered the goods in Bush's lap at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner - watch all three parts.

Trapped in the Closet

Morgan Meis has a great piece on R. Kelly's extraordinary R&B opera:

[It] broke me down and rearranged me as a man. *** You can’t believe you’re watching it, and you can’t stop. You have no idea exactly what it is, even, that you’re watching or how such a thing could possibly have been created . . . and you want more.

You can watch the episodes at YouTube, but apparently you need to hear Kelly's commentary on the DVD as well.

UPDATE: the commentary is also on the Tube - and it's even better than the "Trapped" serial!

Taibbi Knows Jack's Shit

Another instant classic by Matt Taibbi.

All Together Now...

If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.
(clap clap)
If you're happy and you know it then your face will surely show it.
If you're happy and you know it clap your hands (clap clap)

or maybe a little Sam & Dave:

Don't you ever feel sad,
Lean on me when times are bad.
When the day comes and you're down,
In a river of trouble and about to drown

Just hold on, I'm comin',
Hold on, I'm comin'

UPDATE: The homicidal scumbag still doesn't think anything went wrong.

Treated Like Animals? If Only

From a Katrina survivor:

"I would rather have been in jail," Janice Jones said in obvious relief at being out of the [Superdome]. "I've been in there seven days and I haven't had a bath. They treated us like animals."

Not quite, Ms. Jones:

Thousands of people are feared dead in the rubble of storm-shattered New Orleans, but at the New Orleans zoo only three of its 1,400 animals died in the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. The famous Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had a disaster plan for the animals that worked better than the city's plan for humans.

So there we have it: in planning for a catastrophic disaster, our society chooses to save zoo animals and to kill human beings. Make no mistake, this is not a disaster but a crime.

Perhaps that zoo director would have done a better job as head of FEMA than that horse show commissioner. But in Bushland, no one can ever screw up, so it doesn't really matter who's in charge.

Reality and Its Discontents

We know about politically-motivated photo-ops, but this is unconscionable. Kos sums it up: "This is absolutely the most fucked up thing ever done by this president, in a long list of fucked up things."

Marjorie Cohn reminds us:

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

Eli at leftiblog notes that even the Wall Street Journal suggested Cuba as a model for disaster preparedness.

If only Fidel had been in charge instead of FEMA.

Castro conquered Ivan.
Bush was bitch-slapped by Katrina.
No wonder he refuses to face Cindy.

For Bob Denver - RIP, little buddy

The "us" in the U.S.

BushCo's response to Katrina speaks for itself. The question of whether the type of racism on display is deliberate or not is irrelevant. What's worse: treating certain people as inferior or as invisible? In any case, it could not be any clearer that Americans who live in poverty and have dark skin are not considered truly American.

On September 2, Bush stated that "now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world." That part of the world? I didn't know that BushCo's efforts to turn the clock back to the 19th century involved reversing the Louisiana Purchase.

In April 2004, Bush, while justifying his democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun policy, said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

As Robert Jensen notes:

It appears the president intended the phrase "people whose skin color may not be the same as ours" to mean people who are not from the United States. That skin color he refers to that is "ours," he makes it clear, is white. Those people not from the United States are "a different color than white." So, white is the skin color of the United States. That means those whose skin is not white but are citizens of the United States are ...? What are they? Are they members in good standing in the nation, even if "their skin color may not be the same as ours"?

This is not simply making fun of a president who sometimes mangles the English language. This time he didn't misspeak, and there's nothing funny about it. He did seem to get confused when he moved from talking about skin color to religion (does he think there are no white Muslims?), but it seems clear that he intended to say that brown people -- Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East, whatever the category in his mind -- can govern themselves, even though they don't look like us. And "us" is clearly white. In making this magnanimous proclamation of faith in the capacities of people in other parts of the world, in proclaiming his belief in their ability to govern themselves, he made one thing clear: The United States is white. Or, more specifically, being a real "American" is being white. So, what do we do with citizens of the United States who aren't white?

What do we do with them?
We let them drown.

These are the Bush Family Values.

Happy National Preparedness Month

There's irony and then there's irony:

National Preparedness Month is a nationwide effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. National Preparedness Month 2005 is being co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross. Throughout September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross will work with a wide variety of organizations, including local, state and federal government agencies and the private sector, to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote individual involvement through events and activities across the nation.

Look here -- and note the blonde-haired white girl, looking all safe & comfortable. Hmm... I didn't see many blonde-haired white girls in the Superdome, so... Hey, job well done, Homeland Security!
This call, however, puzzled me:

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Oh, wait, I get it: no Red Cross = more dead people = fewer living people, making the evacuation, when they finally got around to it, that much easier! Brilliant!
Yes, die Heimat is in the good hands of Michael Chertoff, who, days after Katrina hit, had no idea that thousands of people were in the New Orleans convention center -- and has the balls to blame the media [UPDATE], the local government, and the impoverished residents who could not evacuate. Un-fucking-believable. I guess he now qualifies for a promotion in this Bush administration.
BTW, if you were wondering, VP Dick Cheney has been hard at work -- making sure the cleanup and rebuilding contracts go to Halliburton. Sound familiar?
Krugman, once again, nails it:

Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?
***
[The Bush administration's contempt for FEMA] reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility

Put another way, under BushCo, government is indeed a force for good, but "good" is defined in terms of the wealthy white Christian male in the mirror.
As Mike Whitney writes, the poor & black

were left to face the rising waters and the government neglect without any prospect of real assistance. When you can't buy your way out, you're left to rot; that's how the "invisible hand" of the free market operates. The message is clear: if you have nothing, you are nothing.

New slogan for the GOP: "If You're Brown, It's Trickle Down or Drown"

Good Fucking Question

Atrios on BushCo's handling of the Gulf Coast disaster:

The emergency preparedness for a medium scale biological or chemical attack, or the "dirty bomb" scenario, would be exactly identical to the kind of preparedness you'd have for a natural disaster of this type. Sure, some of the complications would be different in the various situations, but the basic needs - mass evacuation, temporary shelter, the provision of safe food and water, medical care - would be the same.

Haven't they done fucking anything in 4 years?

This is what you get when an administration is filled with incompetents.
It could not be more obvious that those in power don't really give a damn about the fate of poor black folk -- they're too busy destroying the lives of other darker-skinned people.
More here and here.

Liberal Blogosphere for Hurricane Relief



Please donate now.

The Greatest Act of Terrorism

Sixty years ago, the U.S. dropped two WMDs over Japan, killing a quarter of a million human beings (mostly civilians). Another quarter million continue to suffer the physical consequences today.
Read:

• Frank Brodhead
  
• Norm Dixon
• Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin
• Gary Kohls
• Anthony Gregory
• Richard Drayton
• James Carroll
• Mickey Z
• and the cover-up
  

Melted Idol

DRog brings the funny:

...the audience grew even larger and more enthusiastic when platinum-blonde '80s pop prince Billy Idol delivered a set of oldies such as "Dancing With Myself" and "White Wedding."

At age 50, Idol looked as if he'd stepped out of Madame Tussaud's wax museum, and the heat and his ridiculous leather pants threatened to make him melt onstage, which would have been the most entertaining part of his show.

Taking Over the Controls

Gotta have some laughs as the neo-fascists take another step forward...

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue."
--Lloyd Bridges as Steven McCrosky

iCanned

Jacques Chailley in 1961 (i.e., pre-Walkman, pre-iPod):

The fantastic success of the L.P. record, which has found its way into every home, is perhaps the most important single event in the history of twentieth-century music. Combined with the no less spectacular diffusion of radio and television, it has resulted in "canned music" having become the essential musical nourishment of our generation. ... Thanks to "canned music" we hear infinitely more music than ever before and, if we desire it, of infinitely better quality. But do we listen to it as well as we used to? The best tinned products can never take the place of a sauce carefully prepared and left to simmer slowly over the fire. Is not the loss of that human contact which the concert hall ensures an exorbitant price to pay for this extraordinary all-round enrichment?

from 40,000 Years of Music: Man in Search of Music

Mmmm... pizza...

Another fine piece of investigative journalism from Steve Colbert.

Who's Crazy?

A rare moment of sanity on Capitol Hill, courtesy of George Galloway. Democrats should take a few lessons from this George.

But turn the dial to 60 Minutes for some more insanity from the American Taliban that makes me want to throw my TV and/or myself out the window. Jesus Fucking Christ. Let's hope the ACLU puts an end to this particular form of abuse & homicide.

UPDATE: Katha Pollitt on "Virginity or Death!":

What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone.... *** As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses--it's in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place.

What Fucking Balls

A magazine made what may be a serious mistake (though of course there's a heap of other documented cases of the military's systematic use of severe humiliation tactics, subsequently buried after the initial uproar over Abu Graib):

Newsweek magazine, under fire for an article that prompted violent protests by mistakenly reporting that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Quran, said Monday it was investigating the matter and would make other corrections or retractions if needed.
***
"It's puzzling. While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story," said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not.
"This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made," McClellan added. "The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged. I just find it puzzling."

Let's get this straight: It has been definitively proven that the Bush Administration intentionally lied to justify its invasion of Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and free promotion for Al-Qaeda's recruiting department. They've never admitted a mistake, and our Kommander-and-Thief has even joked about the fact that there were no WMDs. The incompetence of their intelligence gathering and war planning has been shown to be roughly equivalent to that of the Russians in WWI. And they have the nerve to criticize the "journalistic standards" of a magazine? As if Newsweek is responsible for increasing anti-American sentiment around the world, and not Bush's militant imperialist policies.

What fucking balls.

UPDATE: kos has a similar post, without pointing out the obvious.

UPDATE: Taibbi chimes in:

It's funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of "unnamed sources" is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism. *** [K]issing ass is not a crime in America, while questioning the government often is. At least, you better not screw it up if you try. God help you then.

Round One: Fat Cats 1, Theocrats 0

This filibuster "compromise" is a travesty.

LiberalOasis gets it exactly right:

pressure from corporate interests (who want the judges, but also want the Senate to function so they can get more friendly legislation) is still cutting against the efforts of the Dobsonites [the radical theocrats led by James Dobson].

Fox’s Chris Wallace said yesterday, “I talked to a big business executive this week who was not happy [about the nuclear option]...he said, this is going to be bad for business if the Senate shuts down.”

Yup, Congress was on quite a roll, with class action "reform," bankruptcy "reform," repeal of the inheritance tax, tax breaks and drilling rights given to oil companies, etc. This resolution of the current filibuster struggle perfectly illustrates what today's Republicans (and most Democrats) are all about: lots of noise from the Christo-fascist fundamentalists, but ultimately the wealthy elite calls the shots. There was no way they were gonna risk a shut down of the expensive machinery that rubber-stamps their piracy.

However, this battle for control within the GOP is far from over. Once a seat opens on the Supreme Court, the theocrats will put everything they have (and then some) into getting their way, since the Supremes are the ones who ultimately rule on the issues that matter most to them (marriage, reproductive rights, church/state separation, etc). Should they succeed, there may be no going back.

These judges are by any measure (except perhaps whatever measure they use, if any, in Texas) incompetent and unethical jurists -- especially Karl Rove's hand-crafted monster Priscilla Owen, who thought nothing of taking money from Enron and Halliburton, not recusing herself from cases in which they were a party, and ruling in their favor.

Rich on the Anti-Gay Crusade

Frank Rich explains why Republicans are so intent on going "nuclear" (read it while you can):

Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality. A quarter-century later these views remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. *** Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot Pastor" network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first became active in politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local high-school principal for the crime of presiding over an AIDS-awareness assembly. ***

Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in displaying the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother in a custody case, Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature" and suggested that the state had the power to prohibit homosexual "conduct" with penalties including "confinement and even execution." Another hero is William H. Pryor Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose nomination to the federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his 2003 majority opinion striking down the Texas statute that has since made him the right's No. 1 judicial piñata.

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks.

Happy Birthday, Studs!

93 and counting

Virtual Studs

Nervous Proofreaders Are

How many times do you think writers and editors are going over stories that mention the title of the new Star Wars film, "Revenge of the Sith"?
Future Congressional investigations I see.