cRaptured Away

Welcome to Dystopia

2007-01-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald shines the light on just how far over the fucking rainbow the neocon authority cultists and war monkeys who make up the administration and the base of their supporters are willing to go

How can the same people who claim that the "terrorists hate us because of our freedom" then turn around and implicitly claim that any exercise of that freedom which doesn't conform to their view is equivalent to treason?

Are they just that immune to the irony of their own bullshit?

the mind boggles.

In case you don't know me

2006-12-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

I am a vicious old bastard. I got old before my time.

Except, unlike a right-winger, i don't waste a lot of time trying to pass myself off as being terribly tough or hardcore.

My penchant for fighting has aged me prematurely, and some mornings my body regrets things that my mind and soul do not.

My brief detour into crime and violence when i was young have taught me lessons that some of these punk-ass wingnuts who have never gotten their hands dirty could never come close to understanding.

I can tell you that most of the people who are pro-torture should take a stun-gun to the genitals or get used for a punching bag a few times before they commit to that point of view.

And just so you know, back when i was at the worst of my amoral and thuggish behavior, i regularly voted Republican, as did the people i worked for.

I don't think Rick Moran likes me very much

2006-11-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

So, after months of attending to the process of living life instead of cowering under my desk afraid that there might be brown people lurking behind every fucking corner waiting to be mean to me, a la the average right wing blogger, i come out of my cave like some perverse and perverted fusion of Punxsatawney Phil and Grendel and see that the post-election weather means that the long winter of Republican control of the House and the Senate is nearly at its end and it is once again safe for at least quasi-rational creatures to once again roam freely about the land.

My first action was to pay a visit to my favorite gang of snarky bastiches over at Sadly, No! and see that some guy at the (approriately named) Right-wing Nuthouse was taking them and some other fine bloggers to task for not being sufficiently meek and subdued to keep him from catching a frightful case of the vapors

As i would have fully exptected of them the Sadly, No! crew responded appropriately to Little Ricky's display of dismay, and upon reading some of the comments in the exchange, i couldn't help but volunteer a few remarks of my own

says me:

27. The Crapture Said:
7:35 pm

You’ll have to forgive me if i’m not sympathetic to how chagrined you seem to be over the election outcome and the displays of unrestrained schadenfreude from some bloggers and commenters that have come as a result, but after listening to the unfiltered bleatings of people who live in some twilight of perpetual panic as though al Qaeda was going to unleash waves of exploding gay Mexicans over our borders to take away our guns and teach evolution to our embryos unless we scrap the Constitution in favor of old-fashioned, old-Testament values, i’m just not prepared to regard most of the authority cultists passing themselves off as conservatives with a straight face

and Herr Moron replies:

29. Rick Moran Said:
7:56 pm

Mr. Shit er…Crap:

“after listening to the unfiltered bleatings of people who live in some twilight of perpetual panic as though al Qaeda was going to unleash waves of exploding gay Mexicans over our borders to take away our guns and teach evolution to our embryos unless we scrap the Constitution in favor of old-fashioned, old-Testament values,

Hysterical. Wildly exaggerated. So over the top as to be on another planet.

If that’s really what you think you’re sick. If you’re just trying to sound clever, you’re not. If you’re trying to make a point, just what the hell is it?

Well, if you weren't so busy pissing in your pants in fear of brown people, gay people, Muslims and anything else that makes your palms turn slimy orange with that peculiar mix of Cheeto-dust and fear-sweat, you would see that Wild, hysterical, over the top exaggeration is EXACTLY my point.

I'm dying to see what Little Ricky has to say about my assessment of the latest Republican calls for "Bipartisanship"

now that ought to be comedy gold.

If this turns out to be any sort of full fledged pissing match, i'll feel like i've arrived as a blogger. But if not, c'est la vie

It's very simple

2006-06-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

Ann Coulter's tack of playing the victim for all of the heat she's caught for being the nasty sack of snot that she is and saying all of the hateful shit she has said in her book displays the same level of unmitigated chutzpah as someone having the nerve to show up to a party reeking paint thinner, taking a dump in the punchbowl, insulting all of the guests and then wondering why everyone but the really fucked-up drunks want to throw her out of the highest possible window.

i used to hang around with someone like that. She insulted me regularly and then had the nerve to wonder why i quit putting up with her bullshit. The mainstream media have proven to be a different breed of whores and masochists in that Little Annie Adam's-Apple of the Third Reich shits on them regularly and not only do they keep inviting her back, but they defend her while she does it.

It's the sort of behavior akin to cultivating a tumor in your brain and then declaring, even after it has eaten off half of your face that not only is it NOT malignant, but that you look forward to the day when it finishes consuming your head and then eats the rest of your family

Hey, Cohen:

2006-05-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Is something like THIS a little more comedic to you:

At a black-tie dinner for journalists, Mr Bush narrated a slide show poking fun at himself and other members of his administration.

One pictured Mr Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

After another one, showing him scouring the corner of a room, Mr Bush said: "No, no weapons over there," he said.

And as a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen the president was heard to say: "Maybe under here?"

The audience at Wednesday's 60th annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association obviously thought the quips hilarious - there were laughs all round - but the next morning, in the cold light of day, things looked far less amusing.

Yeah, that's really fucking cute there, just the sort of stuff that positively KILLS in a room full of whores and sycophants like the kind our press has become in the course of covering this rampaging clusterfuck of an administration

Or, dear Richard, is it just that this particular misbegotten spawn of a silver gorilla named Bar deserves some special degree of deference and reverence because he's a republican?

Did you find Don Imus' remarks at the 1996 Correspondents' Dinner to be respectful and appropriate?

To be honest, the text of that speech may be some of the funniest stuff i've ever heard from Imus ...since god knows on TV and on radio Imus comes across as this boring, barely-animate scrap of leather that someone saw fit to prop up in front of a microphone.

I guess there is something to the notion of wearing kid-gloves with Bush as opposed to Clinton as, in spite of his personal shortcomings, Clinton seems to possess a genuine sense of humor and is not an emotionally immature psychopath with a messiah complex like little Dubya.

And by the way, Mr. Cohen, you might want to give Chris Matthews back those custom-made kneepads with the White House logo embossed on them before he misses another chance to service the President

Well-rehearsed indignance

2006-05-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

So a good percentage of the various Bush apologist/whores we have come to call our media all have their panties in a bunch over the spanking they got from Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night.

Yeah, well... fuck 'em.

Since the Reagan-era, our media has spent an inordinate amount of time fellating right-wing assholes so as not to seem "biased" and then after decades of that type of professional, for-profit knob-gobbling, they have the nerve to object to being portrayed as low-grade street corner whores.

At least the damage that can be caused by an actual street-corner trollop is comparatively minimal in that at worst she may give a few johns an STD. The grand and unrelenting whoredom we call the media is more than willing to transmit their collective war-gasm into the homes of millions like the biggest, nastiest collective snow-balling ever committed.

I don't remember hearing so much outrage over Don Imus' genuinely tasteless and disrespectful appearance at the same function ten years ago, but then maybe that's because Clinton and his supporters have a sense of humor and he only had one person (as opposed to the whole press corps) sucking him off.

Hey Tweety, giving those kneepeds a workout, eh?

Maybe we could call it "Ass-clown Roulette"

2006-04-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

Some mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging right-wing jackoff named Brian James over at local Nazi-radio shit-hole KFYI made remarks last night encouraging the idea of randomly killing border crossers.

What we’ll do is randomly pick one night - every week - where we will kill whoever crosses the border. Step over there and you die. You get to decide whether it’s your lucky night or not. I think that would be more fun…[I’d be] happy to sit there with my high-powered rifle and my night scope.

Well, Hey, Brian, I've got an idea, how about if someone with a high-powered rifle and a night-scope was to, once a week, randomly select a wingnut radio station and play a little Ass-cLown roulette whenever you or one of your colleagues or peers at your station or another one like it was coming off shift... I think that would be fun...don't you?

(NOTE: Unlike Mr. James, I actually AM JUST KIDDING... unlike that shitbag i am not stupid enough to publicly advocate that sort of crime and if i was serious about having harm come to such a punk-ass bitch as Brian James, you can bet your ass i wouldn't be saying anything like this out loud)

The politics of distraction

2006-04-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

While there are definitely sinister undercurrentes to the whole thing, i think the biggest reason that this whole immigration debate has been whipped up to such a fever pitch is because the republican jackoffs who instigated it and dragged it to the forefront of media consciousness didn't have any convenient members of the Jackson family to scapegoat out as symptoms of America's ills and conveniently gloss over or skate past the consistent levels of failure and incompetence that the Bush assministration and the culturally corrupt republican majority in the House and Senate.

Shorter Republican Party "Sure we are cornholing you, your parents, your grandparents, your grandchildren and the Constitution without the slightest hint of mercy, but look! over there...Brown people! Be afraid!"

More on that last thought

2006-02-16T12:40:00.000-08:00

Again, i'm just saying that there's maybe a little more beneath the surface than we're being told.

i can only guess

2006-02-13T15:20:00.000-08:00

Maybe Dick Cheney's hunting buddy was dressed up as The Constitution.

It would explain quite a lot.

I'm just sayin'.

An open letter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff

2006-02-02T16:05:00.000-08:00

Sirs;

By way of a favorite site of mine called This Modern World I read about your letter to the Washington Post expressing your concern about that day's Tom Toles cartoon and Mr. Tole's criticism of Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

If you had expressed your ire over the cartoon as ordinary citizens, it would have been perfectly understandable and laudable on its own merits, even if I am inclined to disagree with your assessment of Toles' message or intention.

That you chose to express this as a group and in such official terms places you in a position which does not align with the oaths you each swore upon entrance into the Armed Forces. At this rate, Sirs, you run the risk of ceasing to be defenders of the Constitution of the United States of America and the freedoms it represents, and becoming the enforcers of a mendacious, dishonest regime which has betrayed you at every opportunity and views those under your command as mere fodder for their profit margins.

Does it not chafe in the least bit when the Secretary responds to valid questions from the troops about the lack of armor, ordnance and reinforcement personnel by blithely remarking "You go to war with the Army you have, not with the Army you wish you had?"

Does it not turn your stomachs when the Secretary tries to deflect criticism and excuse his ignorance every time he insists that every potential clusterfuck that could have been avoided or minimized if he had listened to those of your subordinates and peers (who have learned either from genuine combat experience or from at least a functioning grasp of "strategy") was "unknowable?"

And really, Sirs, after they've been stop-lossed enough times wouldn't "battle weary" be a truer description than "Battle hardened?"

Toles' cartoon points to the loss of personnel, materiel and motivation engendered by Secretary Rumsfeld's deadly combination of blind incompetence and insistent ignorance.

While I understand that the UCMJ precludes you from openly criticizing the SecDef, there is nothing in the Code which states that you must defend and endorse him against valid criticisms, nor that you use a patently dishonest argument to counter that criticism.

If you are trying to imply that the cartoonist was mocking the members of our armed forces who have bled and died in no small part to your boss' inability to plan his way out of a fucking wet paper bag, Sirs, than i must question your intelligence as well as your integrity.

Sincerely,

The Crapture

convenient monsters

2006-01-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that when the issue facing the President is his failure to catch or kill the murdering shitbag who attacked America on September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush doesn't seem to be very concerned

On the flip, when Emperor Chimp-stain gets caught with his ass in the breeze over Domestic Spying, suddenly, and as if on cue, Osama makes like a fuckin' groundhog and President George, simpering little bitch that he is conveniently becomes concerned if it will help him spin his Big Brother tactics as a necessity.

F'ing with Gonzo

2006-01-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

Fucking with Gonzo

Between taking various agents of the US Department of Justice off of more pressing matters to resurrect the great government wankathon that is the investigation of pornography, Gonzales' DOJ recently pressed the three major internet search engines to turn over their search logs mainly under the fear that somewhere, someone might be looking at stuff that might make Baby-Jesus-as-envisioned-by-the-Bush-crowd cry (or jack off)

So far, Google has fought the DOJ on tbis and refused to turn over their search logs

IN the event that google eventually accedes to the request, it is my goal to have Google's search logs filled with just enough hits on enough bizarre and outlandish shit that blurs the line between porn and politics that it confuses the crap out of whatever bunch of swinging bureaucratic dicks gets called in to actually analyze the logs

So, with that in mind, please click the following links to really give the Ministry of Love something to ponder:

osama dildo santorum

plutonium nipple bomb mehlman three way

Lynne Cheney lesbian fatwa camel

Bush Twins uranium anal Jihad

Karl Rove yellowcake bukkake

McClellan suicide bomb rim job Jeff Gannon

700 Club al Zawahiri nuclear butt plug

Rumsfeld anthrax tit-fuck

Chris Matthews would be right at home with the ho's on East Van Buren

2006-01-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

From the "Open Letter to Chris Matthews" blog which was born in the wake of his decision to shoot his GOP-whore mouth off, we see a few shining examples of why the "Liberal Media" has been a myth for ages:

MATTHEWS implies Al Qaeda is 'trying to get people to vote Democrat for president.' He asks Democratic Senator Breaux: 'Doesn't it put your party in a terrible position of having al-Qaeda rooting for you?' (Hardball, 7/18/04)

MATTHEWS accuses Democrats of "perhaps exploiting" the death and destruction in Iraq (Hardball, 11/1/05)

MATTHEWS says Bush sometimes "glimmers" with "sunny nobility" (Hardball, 10/24/05)

MATTHEWS suggests Bush may "belong on Mount Rushmore" (Hardball, 12/16/05)

MATTHEWS argues that the U.S. went into Iraq "for altruistic purposes" (Chris Matthews Show, 9/25/05)

MATTHEWS insists "everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs" (Hardball, 11/28/05)

MATTHEWS recites GOP talking points during fight over Bush's judicial nominees, describes Democratic efforts as "just sort of pouting and bitching" (Hardball, 5/18/05)

MATTHEWS levels baseless charge against Democratic efforts to complete intel probe as "disingenuous," "using crocodile tears" (Hardball, 11/1/05)

MATTHEWS describes Supreme Court debate as division between strict constructionism versus the "loosey goosey" liberal approach (MSNBC, 10/3/05)

MATTHEWS praises Bush for a "brilliant" speech, before it was delivered, while attacking Democratic critics as "carpers and complainers" (MSNBC, 11/30/05)

MATTHEWS falsely attacks Democrats for accusing Alito of being "lenient on the mob" (Hardball, 10/31/05)

MATTHEWS praises John Roberts' confirmation as "miraculously successful" (MSNBC, 9/29/05).

Good lord, if he's gonna fellate the White House and the RNC with that much enthusiasm, you can just see the strands of saliva and other fluids glistening off of his lips and the hear bad 70's porn music in the background

Sweet jeeezus, does he gag? Does Karl push down on his head?

And since the Clinton Blowjob is the only presidential scandal for which he can muster any ire, maybe it'd be better frame the issue of his sycophancy to Bush by asking Chrissy-boy when he's getting fitted for that blue dress

Happy suck day, Matthews.

If that was how she was gonna use it...

2006-01-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

...God should have never given Lucianne Goldberg a uterus:

Ignoring the infinitely more recent examples and historically consistent habit of "Conservatives" to crawl into bed with monsters and dictators:

Jonah "Sorry-assed, Doughy pantload" Goldberg reaches back 85 years to the Sacco-Vanzetti case to make a point about the wrongheadedness of liberals because of something George Clooney said.

Mr. Goldberg, let me remind you it was a conservative president who authorized the decision to use the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected leader in Iran in August of 1953, replacing him with a tyrannical dictator who was more friendly to American business interests, It was another conservative who decided that putting Saddam Hussein on America's payroll was a good idea and that genocidal dictators in Central America were good allies. It's a conservative president now who, through his blind stubborness and rampant incompetence, has inflicted as much if not more misery upon Saddam's former subjects than the mad dictator himself did when he was the lap-dog of Reagan and Bush the Elder.

Does the name Islam Karimov ring a bell to you, Jonah? Friend of Bush, boils dissidents alive. Anything?

Next time you're in DC, ask Director Negroponte is the phrase "flying nun" brings up any other associations besides bad television shows from the 60's

Prescott Bush + Fritz Thyssen = Bush Family Dynasty.

Jonah, while you're at it, ask Henry Kissinger why he's not welcome in Chile.

Well then that pretty much rules you out, buddy.

2006-01-09T16:21:00.001-08:00

In what may well be one of the most laughable remarks made by a wingnut in recent history, Samuel "scAlito" Alito says somthing that is undeniably true, but fails to realize how it applies to him in the negative.

Quoth Scalito: "Good judges don't have an agenda, don't look for partisan outcomes and always 'do what the law requires' "

Come on, Sammy, the only reason that The Chimp even considered you is because you will carry water for him and HIS imperial agenda, which you share.

More laughable still was a remark from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asking the Senate not to let politics enter into the confirmation process

"We must apply a judicial, not a political, standard to this record," Hatch said.

Bullshit, Senator.

Everyone George W. Bush has nominated to the bench or to positions in his cabinet has been for expressly political purposes and not because they were genuinely and sincerely the best person for the job.

*Mike Brown at FEMA: yeah, a low level horse-show lawyer as the guy in charge of disaster response. Best man for the job? Hardly. He certainly did a "heck of a job" with that whole Hurricane Katrina situation now, didn't he.

*Bernie Kerik even nominated for the USDHS? Hah. It took a rare moment of the media taking the Rove-tool out of their mouths and raising questions about his personal ethics to de-rail that guy.

*Harriet Meiers: No nothing political there other than her gross and blatant sycophancy

*Priscilla Owen: Right-wing fanatic to appease The Base

*Need i go on?

No, Strip-search Sammy is no different, Bush and/or his handlers want to create an over-powerful Executive branch in order to give themselves carte blanche to whatever abuses they wish to commit and they need someone to interpret the Constitution in such a way as to grant their wish.

The agenda behind his appointment, Senator Hatch, is nakedly political and you insult the intelligence of millions to even imply otherwise.

Well then that pretty much rules you out, buddy.

2006-01-09T16:21:00.000-08:00

Arrest me, Bitches.

2006-01-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

Emperor George W. Chimpy-McWhistle-ass just signed a law stating that anyone posting annoying web posts, messages or e-mails must do so with their actual name.

The language was slipped into an unrelated piece of legislation as part of a reauthorization of funding to DOJ.

There was better language previously in place as part of an anti-stalking statute, but the basic gist of this new language seems to be that the anonymous expression of controvertsial and potentially "annoying" opinions (though precisely what constitutes "annoying" is not clearly defined if at all) could now be criminlaized

Here's what i have to say to that:

Fuck you, George, I ain't gonna,

Fuck your mouth-breathing, kool-aid drinking apologists, your cabinet members, and most of all, fuck your misguided worshipers who revere you as if you were God's chosen President.

In fact, fuck them most of all, they are all loads their mothers should have swallowed.

With that said, the gauntlet is thrown down:

now come get me you subliterate sack of shit son of a sociopathic silver gorilla.

come on, send me a team of the finest federal Brownshirts that Abu Gonzales can muster.

See if i don't actually decide to take that asshole G. Gordon Liddy's advice.

May your terriers conjugate on your leg, you testimony to the possibility of rectal gestation.

Sincerely,

The Crapture
(clearly not my real name)

The Crapture

Funny as hell

2005-12-29T12:16:00.001-08:00

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

2005-12-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in hell they are ice-skating

2005-12-29T11:53:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-12-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-12-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-12-13T16:13:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-12T13:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-12-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

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?"

2005-12-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

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?"

2005-12-08T16:42:00.000-08:00

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...

2005-12-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

~~is blogger eating my entries or is it just me?~~

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

File under "Huh, WTF?"

2005-12-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

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.