Funny as hell

Eric Alterman points us to this fantastic post from the archives of The Editors and it's still as brutally funny now as it was then.

Funny as hell

Somewhere in hell they are ice-skating

I actually find myself agreeing with Glenn Reynolds about something

The something in this case happens to be the content of video games and television and the wholesale willingness of large numbers of parents and what i would call The Professionally Concerned to abdicate their own discretion in favor of lobbying like-minded legislators to force their limited sensibilities on the rest of us.

The rest of his blog is, as usual, full of varying depths and degrees of shit, but much like the proverbial Stopped Clock, The Nutty Perfesser is occasionally right.

Back when i was a something of a criminal in my early college days, the bulk of my film viewing was a mixture of screwball comedy and angsty melodramas and much of my musical selection skewed toward gospel, classical and early jazz. Also, coincidentally enough, the only videogames i owned were all cartridges for an Atari 2600 that had been deader than elvis since just before i graduated from high-school.

So as a nearly lifelong gamer, i can tell you that it was the times when i was BEREFT of games in which i was more prone to getting into trouble.

Oh, Really, now?

Senator John McCain (R-pathetic "christian right" lackey) says that "students should decide" whether "intelligent design" should be taught or accepted as true.


I tell you what, if i was a high-school student, i'd be having a field day with that idea:


Now, the reporter covering the sotry speculates that McCain wouldn't likely endorse the same subjective approach to other facets of the scholastic experience, but realistically, once you open the proverbial floodgates to one subjective approach to a subject, it becomes gross hypocrisy to not grant the same wide berth to that approach elsewhere. I mean we see the "make shit up and defend it as hard fact" approach enough from politicians, talking heads and Bush apologists all the time, so why not let the kids apply it to their homework?

Just not when you do it to the CIA, right George?

Emperor Chimpy McWhistle-ass decried the NYWhoreTimes for momentsrily pretending to have a set and blowing the whistle on his violation of FISA and other domestic surveillance laws as "a shameful act"


Hate to remind you of this, Chimpy-boy, but i think that Joe iIlson and Valerie Plame might have a thing or two to say to you about your indignance, and i don't imagine your punk ass would like it much.

It can now be said with certainty

Hardball's Chris Matthews is Karl Rove and G-Dub's PERSONAL BITCH

(from Crooks And Liars)

Matthews: So what do you think about your paper, running that story the very day of the President's greatest victory? You guys are raining on his parade, the best day of his life.

[snip]

Matthews: ..if this gamble comes through and it's note clear yet. If this gamble that he can create a democracy in the middle of the Arab world, and he does it; he belongs on Mt. Rushmore....

Mount Rushmore?

Is Matthews out of his Rove-spooge-addled mind?

What about the candy and flowers that we were told our troops were going to be greeted with, i didn't know they measured candy in millimeter and caliber increments, O, Mindless Tweety-bitch. I didn't know that FTD Florists' Iraqi division specialized in Improvised Explosive Bouquets.

Chris, your beloved Chimperor's "greatest victory" has no value outside the realm of propaganda unless and until proven otherwise, but in the meantime we are certain that Chimpy and AG Abu Gonzales have placed themseleves above the very laws and rules they swore to enforce and defend by deciding that they needed to obey neither existing laws allowing for domestic spying nor FISA rules allowing for survellance of foreign parties on American soil.

Torture DOESN'T Work (at least not for information gathering)

Irrational, Unhinged, Neo-con jack-pipe Charles "crap-hammer" Krauthammer argues in defense of torture on the old sliding rhetorical crutch of "well, what if there was a bomb about to go off,then torture is ok, right?"

Sorry, but NO.

Unless they have been conditioned to withstand it, people being tortured will tell you any goddamn thing that they think will make the pain stop.

Interrogative torture is worthless.

But that does not stop our erstwhile war and torture apologist from expounding thus:

Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue. That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.

Well, Herr doktor, by that line of logic, anyone who reads the the Bible or the Torah is equally prone to violence, so if you've got more than two brain cells to rub together, i think it best not to venture in that direction.

Oh, but the bullshit gets better:

there is the terrorist with information. Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply. Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

BZZZZT!


WRONG!

If your hypothetical bomber is committed enough, he/she will either still tell you nothing, or worse, they will LIE and divert your resources in the proverbial "wild goose chase" thus allowing the hypothetical bom to go off and leaving you look like a very real jackass. Also, since we're playing with hypotheses, assume for a moment that the person you have in your clutches has insufficient knowledge of the location of the hypothetical bomb as his hypothetical masters would have likely divided the bombing plans among small, disparate cells of hypothetical terrorists for the explicit purpose of rendering any confession worthless.

Kraphammer, in his simple-minded neo-con droolings assumes that the enemy is as simple-minded as he himself, but when you consider that there have still been major terror attacks since the Black Sites were established suggests a more sophisticatedlevel of organization and planning than can be addressed by coercive interrogation.

From my own experiences having been on the receiving end of a private-sector torture session and from my own experiences coercing information out of people as a debt collector for parties i cannot name, physical torture is typically only useful as a strictly punitive measure.

Threatening someone's pets, lovers or family members in a convincing fashion is infinitely more effective for extracting information because then the subject believes that not only will there be terrible consequences (and whether or not you actually make good on the threats is beside the point half the time) - they believe that they will be forced to LIVE with themselves having been the instrument of undue harm on their own friends/family/pets... It's an infinitely less human thing to do, but unless you've actually ever gotten your hands dirty laying a beating on someone or been on the receiving end of that sort of violence, you really should just shut the tapdancing fuck up, Chuckles.

This is what you want, this is what you get

When one makes a career out of dishing shit out...

...one had goddamn well better be able to take it

At the bottom of the article, a likely Coulter apologist says this:

UConn junior Kareem Mohni, 20, said he was disgusted by his peers' reaction to Coulter.

"It really appalled me that we're not able to come together as a group and listen to a different view in a respectful environment," Mohni said.

I dunno if Mr. Mohni has read or listened to enough of Ms. Coulter to recognize the irony of his statements, because it's not like she of the pronounced Adam's-apple is a big proponent of being respectful of any people or points of view that are not in agreement with her deranged perspective.

In fact, I'll paraphrase Ms. Coulter's remark about her only regret, vis-a-vis Timothy McVeigh:

My only regret about Timothy McVeigh is that it Ann Coulter wasn't the only person killed in the Murrah Federal Building that day.

(and is it just me, or does she look like the depraved offspring of Courtney Love and Lurch from the Addams Family in that picture)

Sorry, man, but i have to call "Bullshit" here.

In a move that is so very NOT rock-and-roll, Moby suggests that Eminem has blood on his hands because some dumbassed fan decided to emulate the concepts in the song "Stan."

Now, musically, I'm a much bigger Moby fan than i am an Eminem fan....and by a damn sight too.

But the constant insinuation by some people, whether it be Jerry Falwell, Bob "will no-one exorcise my demons of stupidity" Larson, Joe Lieberman, Tipper Gore or Moby that the music/movie/videogame is more responsible for the actions of any number of unbalanced asshole than the unbalanced assholes themselves is just stupid.

I was getting into fights long before i ever played Mortal Kombat, my period of suicidal teenage depression couldn't possibly have been caused by the 40's and 50's era jazz i was listening to at the time and if it had been during my heavy-metal phase, i'd have offed myself when i was 13, and even though i've listened to any number of outrageously misogynist songs in my life, me and most people have never let it influence us into mistreating women.

And since a solid majority of my friends since i was a teenager have been gay (they're still all gay, even if not all of them are still necessarily my friends - i point that out so that Wacko Jim Dobson and his "Ex-gay" proponents will start foaming at the mouth) i can safely attest that the homophobia expressed in some of the songs in my music library has not rubbed off on me either.

Sounds like the work of Doctor Benway

Kevin Drum relates something here which proves that the Bush Assministration is more concerned with waging a war on freedom than they are with waging any so-called War on Terror (tm).

Kinda reminds me of a great excerpt from Burroughs' Naked Lunch:

Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant "provisional detention"; that is, the prisoner would be released if and when his Affidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was approved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his office, and the Affidavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities.
Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.

More and more, this is not America.

well, i guess, it's "Murika" now

So, are they going to get any of "The Horror?"

A number of large curches have said they will not be having Sunday services on Christmas Day

Is this another "secular progressive" (which is really just wingnut code for "Jew") plot to destroy Christmas, Bill?

Are you going to show them the horror?

Douchebag.

maybe that should be "WTF is Wrong with Kansas?"

Apparently in Kansas, the deep, abounding love of Jesus Christ is spread by way of blunt-force trauma to the head and body

To wit:

A Kansas college professor at the center of a controversy over a course on creationism and intelligent design said Monday that he was beaten by two men.

University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki said he was attacked along a rural road early Monday and that the attackers referred to the class. He said he confronted two men who had been tailgating him.

Mirecki said he was beaten on the head, shoulders and back with fists, and possibly a metal object.

He told the Lawrence Journal-World that he didn't know the attackers but is sure they know him.

Of course in the world of Coulterite mouth-breathing fucktards, being subject to verbal mockery is infinitely less tolerable than committing violent assaults on your detractors

The professor asked the university to cancel the class after he sent an e-mail to a student organization in which he mocked Christian fundamentalists.

He has since apologized.

Yeah, Annie, i've got your baseball bat right here, you dieased piece of shit.

Oh hell yeah...

Mike Wallace shoots...

AND HE SCORES!!!

Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance?

A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

To bad the apple fell really far from this tree and landed in the abyss of pseudo-journalism known as FOX News

inversely proportional

The degree to which right-wing evangelical "Christians" feel oppressed is inversely proportional to their ability to oppress others

The inevitable conclusion of this whole "war on christmas" horseshit that the fundies keep trotting out is that they'll inspire enough of a backlash against them that it will, at least superficially, resemble a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The tendency of anyone out there to openly mock the season has a fuckload less to do with some "secular progressive" hatred towards Christianity and a LOT to do with pissing off profesional whiners like this Prelutsky assclown or loose-cannon-douchebag Bill O'Reilly

And speaking of Falafel Bill:

Come on, Bitch, bring me The Horror

I DARE YOU

A heck of a job

In a case of a public official taking the notion of personal responsibility for their failure to an extreme, Wang Wei, the vice-mayor of Jilin, China has apparently hanged himself according to reports from the Xinhua news agency.

Jilin, of course, is the site of that big chemical plant explosion and water contamination crisis that has, to a certain extent, become China's ostensible counterpart to Hurricane Katrina at least as far as the government's inability to respond to the crisis in a timely and seemingly competent fashion.

Wang had been quoted as saying that the accident would not cause widespread pollution.

In fact 112 tons of cancer-causing benzene compounds spilt into the Songhua river which provides drinking water for the 9 million people of the city of Harbin.

I wonder, at any point did he call himself a "fashion god"

Meanwhile, instead of tapdancing around the isssue of accountablity for the situation, Wal-Mart's biggest customer stated that misconduct in the matter would be dealt with.

Official media have reported that Beijing has promised harsh punishment for anyone guilty of misconduct over the incident.

Investigators would also look into attempts to cover up the gravity of the incident, Xinhua news agency said.

hmm.

Scouring and scraping

I'm not always right on top of current events, i tend to ruminate on things that catch my attention between tasks in the office. (Yes, i'm sure my employers would love to know that little tidbit, but hell, i've even managed to rattle off blog entries and posts in other blogger's threads while genuinely - and successfully multitasking)

I came across some of the vodka-soaked ramblings of Christopher Hitchens from from a couple of weeks ago in which he tries to call for a more elevated if not necessarily more civil degree of discourse in the debate about the Iraq war while stooping to calling Rep. John Murtha "simple minded" and then, in this gem of a paragraph, equating opponents of little Georgie's War for Oil with the pacifists of WWI and the anti-semitic isolationists who lobbied to keep America out of WWII.

But all right, let's stay with withdrawal. Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between "over here" and "over there." There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his "exit strategy" from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just "over the horizon" in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The big difference, Hitchens, is that unlike our issues with Middle Eastern instability, our government did NOT play a key role in laying the foundations for WWI and WWII by offering direct political and financial support to the same unholy dictators and monsters against whom we went to war.

Except for the Bush family, who coincidentally enough has had their fingers (by way of grandpa Prescott) on the funds that went to Hitler during the rise of the Reich and (by way of Poppy 41) to Saddam, back when he was Ronald Reagan's pet dictator in the region.

But, hey, Hitch... don't let something as inconvenient as history get in the way of a steaming pile of apologetics.

weirdness

is blogger eating my entries or is it just me?

Apparently it was just me... (or was it?)

File under "Huh, WTF?"

You have absolutely got to be kidding me

Designers of a Flight 93 memorial have made a bowl-shaped piece of land its centerpiece, replacing a crescent-shape design that some critics had said was a symbol honoring terrorists, officials announced Wednesday.

The new design for the memorial, to be built on the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, crash near Shanksville, features most of the details of the original, which victims' relatives helped select after a worldwide design competition

Seriously, this is stupid.

By this logic then, we can argue that because it has been used by terrorist organizations purporting to be Christian, the Cross honors the IRA, the KKK and the 700 KKKlub

But then again, Stupid Is Where You Find It:

After the original design was unveiled in September, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., criticized it in a letter to the National Park Service director, saying many questioned the shape "because of the crescent's prominent use as a symbol in Islam — and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists."

Since the letter "C" is ostensibly crescent-shaped, perhaps we should have it stricken from the alphabet so as not to inadvertently be "honoring terrorists"

Maybe we kan all appeal to the Kongressman from Kolorado to wage his holy Krusade against subversive letters and other kressent-shaped stuff. It might make it a little harder to go to tshurtsh on sunday mornings and Kristmas would seem a little "off" but at least then we kould rest assured that we weren't paying any undue homage to any skary, ikky brown people. ++If you know how Rep. Tankkkredo feels about Mexikans, it's probably just as well that all those of us born with a tan give the fukker a wide berth++

Satan's Little Helper

Pat "Take him out" Robertson shoots his mouth off again (and unfortunately, he still hasn't made sure to use a loaded gun when doing so.)

In a deliberate case of "making shit up because no one will call me on it" the 700 KKKlub fixture attributes flings the following load of horseshit in an attempt to smear the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church & State:

ROBERTSON: Barry [Lynn] is -- Barry says that if a church is burning down, the local community could not send the fire engine to put the fire out because that would violate, quote, separation of church and state. He is fanatical.

Strangely enough, he was discussing the latest fundamentalist straw-man du jour - the so-called "War on Christmas" with that most inescapable of shrill weirdos... John "8 to the noggin" Gibson.

Rev. Lynn, however calls "bullshit" with the following smackdown on old Pat's doddering arse:

Robertson, for example, continues to tell national television audiences that I believe that a public fire department can't go to a burning church without violating the separation of church and state. He apparently uses this "anecdote" to demonstrate my radical, wacky beliefs.

Trouble is (for him), I never said it and don't believe it. Journalists who have heard the claim and bothered to research the point fail to find evidence of me saying it. The reason is that fictional attributions don't show up in Internet news databases.

And really, considering the things he says, would we have to slap a turban on Robertson and overdub his audio with the flailings of Osama bin Laden or some of those crazy sheiks who advocate that all sorts of bad things befall us before someone called him out for what he really is:

...just another hate-filled, deranged, radical cleric.

Alito: completely g**damn nuts

Via a post over at Digby's Blog we discover that ScAlito is apparently cut from the same "shoot-em-in-the-head" cloth as FAUX New's deranged and pigment-bereft John "8 to the noggin" Gibson.

When I took Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure a number of years ago, we debated the same case in class and even the cops who were there couldn't support killing a clearly unarmed suspect in flight.

you know...shooting someone in the back.

With my own "youthful indiscretions" in mind, having been an unarmed suspect in flight a couple of times when i was a kid, I am personally glad that the Supremes of that day didn't buy into Strip-Search Sammy's idea of what constitutes a reasonable means to seize a suspect.