Frustration, alienation, hatred does not begin to compare to how I feel about the murderous treasonous thugs of the Bush misadministration.
The man we buried a few days ago lived to be 92. Had lived in a house he built with family for over 50 years! We told stories about him and his life until 2am.
What kind of stories are the parents and loved ones of these soldiers going to be able to tell?
Nearly 40 trucks carrying fuel to U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have been destroyed in two bomb attacks on the Pakistani border. Officials say about 100 people have been injured.
Local government official Muhammad Iqbal Khan said the blasts late Sunday were from two bombs planted in a parking lot on the Pakistani side of the Torkham customs post.
While Lou Dobbs and a whole host of Neanderthals bash immigrants, even in foolish wars that should never have been fought, those immigrants pay a greater costs than they ever have.
A young, ambitious immigrant from Guatemala who dreamed of becoming an architect. A Nigerian medic. A soldier from China who boasted he would one day become an American general. An Indian native whose headstone displays the first Khanda, emblem of the Sikh faith, to appear in Arlington National Cemetery.
These were among more than 100 foreign-born members of the U.S. military who earned American citizenship by dying in Iraq.
Dead American's, mostly young, killed in Iraq. All for the vanity of people like George Bush & John McCain. And perpetuated by the political calculus of many Democrats as well.
A suicide car bomber penetrated tight security to strike an Iraqi military base on Sunday in the deadliest of a series of attacks that killed at least 42 people across Iraq. In Baghdad, the U.S.-protected Green Zone came under heavy fire by rockets or mortar rounds.
Seven people also were killed and 14 wounded in a suicide car bombing in the Shiite area of Shula in the capital.
Yeah, I just had to re-run this, because I'm nutty about that dress, which was last seen on a 6' 10" black man in four-inch, size thirteen Manolo Blahnick stillettos dancing on a bar 4AM and belting out "I Will Survive." Today, as all the little kids exit church sporting their Easter finery and jonesing for their fix of chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, and Peeps, they'll glimpse the crazy neighbor lady across the way arriving home from her big night on the town in the dress she took off that poor drag queen in a bet that she wouldn't vlog her next OB/GYN appointment. And when those kids see all that pink they're gonna dive like savages for the biggest Eastuh egg the Five Towns has ever seen.
Asked on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show earlier this week about “how fragile” the surge in Iraq is, surge architect and American Enterprise Institute “military analyst” Frederick Kagan declared that “the situation in Iraq today is, I think, not that fragile.” He then added that he believed Iraq would be “fragile” if America made “the mistake of pulling out prematurely.” ...
This, of course, contradicts Iraqi Jesus:
Kagan’s bold claim about the surge’s lack of fragility is directly contradicted by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who told CBS News this week that “while military progress has been made with a ’surge’ of U.S. forces, ‘progress in Iraq is fragile, it is tenuous.’”
In fact, the very next day following Kagan’s remarks, the Guardian reported on one key aspect of the surge’s strategy that is quite fragile: the reliabilty of U.S. alliances with Sunni militia. The report noted that “Sunni militia employed by the US to fight al-Qaida are warning of a national strike because they are not being paid regularly”
You won't be able to reach Fred today. He gets up about 4:30 in the morning to get in line for Easter Brunch at the local Radisson.
Smoke rises from the U.S. protected Green Zone in central Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, March 23, 2008, after it was targeted by a series of rockets or mortars. Some 10 blasts were heard in the sprawling area in central Baghdad starting shortly before 6 a.m. U.S. officials said there was no indication of casualties. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed).
Some 10 blasts were heard starting shortly before 6 a.m in the sprawling area in central Baghdad, which houses the U.S. and British embassies, the Iraqi government headquarters and thousands of American troops.
A policeman drives a motorcycle over police graduates as they demonstrate their skills during a graduation ceremony in Baghdad March 20, 2008. About 900 policemen graduated from the national police school in Baghdad after finishing their training on Thursday. REUTERS/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud(IRAQ)
Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.
I wish I had mad photoshop skillz like Attaturk or watertiger or driftglass, because if I did, I might morph President Bling-Bling into (now former) Governor Ding-Dong. Sure, the former's self-destructive tendencies are have not reached Spitzeresque proportion, but at the rate he's going, all Sarko needs is time.
In an interview with Newsbusters, former Bush adviser Karl Rove claimed that the conservative blogosphere “has much better quality and quantity” than the progressive blogosphere. Calling left-leaning blogs “unpersuasive,” Rove said “they are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.”
I've ever linked to The Corner gladly without snark being involved. I disagree with much of the last paragraph, but that's fair, Charles Murray's conservative and I'm not. (And yes "the Bell Curve" is a terrible and sloppily done book, this is certainly not an endorsement of that)
But the rest of his analysis of Obama's speech is fantastic.
Whether you vote for him or not, it was an amazing and searing speech on racism, the long-standing curse of this country.
[T]he problem generalizes to everyone who tries to be honest about race, and now it has happened to Barack Obama. Take, for example, the treatment of his reference to his white grandmother. Of course you can go after him in all the ways that people have gone after him—if what you want to do is go after him. But suppose you approach Obama’s text under the twin assumptions that (a) he is trying to communicate with you, and, (b) your obligation is to make a good-faith effort to understand his meaning. I read what he said about his grandmother, and his words left me in no doubt about two things: He really loves his grandmother, and he was saying something important about race that I recognized from my own experience. I bet many of the people who have slammed him recognize it from their own experience too. The guy was being honest, and he was being right. What the hell more do you want?
Ah, but he was trashing his grandmother for political purposes, he was equating what she said with the much more terrible things that Rev. Wright said, blah, blah, blah. Yes—if you insist on interpreting what he said purely as an exercise in political positioning. No, if you go to his text with the intention of trying to understand what Obama thinks about race.
I understand how naïve it is to read a presidential candidate’s speech as if it were anything except political positioning, but that leads me to my final point: It’s about time that people who disagree with Obama’s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I’m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We’ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he’s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril.
I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq has defeated terrorism and is well on the road to recovery after five years of war, a confident Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday.
Then the lights went out.
Maliki, known for his steely nerves, tried to continue his speech. But his bodyguards would have none of that.
They hustled him off the stage,, possibly fearing that the power failure might be part of a plot against the prime minister.
Maliki's speech was an attempt to boost his nation's morale on the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. But its abrupt end was a reminder of the obstacles ahead.
Iraqis must cope with frequent power outages, lack of clean drinking water, rampant joblessness — and the ever-present fear of violent death. Five years of bombs, bullets and sectarian slaughter have sapped much of the spirit from this troubled nation. Despite signs of progress, many Iraqis hold out little hope for a quick end to their suffering.
"The situation is very unstable," said Jassim Mohammed, 40, a Sunni employee of the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad. "I simply do not see any light at the end of this dark tunnel."
I can only imagine the doubled-upped dry heaving Gore Vidal could induce out of the Doughy Pantload, but then again, great people of letters don't usually debate those who write shitty books after coming up with the cover.
The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says “We gotta fight ’em over there or we’re gonna have to fight ’em over here.” This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with “news” magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be “good” Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.
The "Mr. Show" duo of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross are returning to HBO with "David's Situation," a new comedy pilot starring Cross.
Odenkirk and Cross co-wrote the project, which will star Cross as himself. He leaves Hollywood to move into a suburban, gated community where he has two roommates, a right-wing conservative and a liberal hippie.
And here's some more funny (I love these guys -- as you've probably long figured out)
Last Saturday night, The Kenosha Kid invited the divine watertiger and me to a talk by Richard Dawkins at one of the high temples of Liberal Elitism, the Society for Ethical Culture. This is the kind of place, along with BAM and the sculpture garden at MOMA, that sends the Joe Scarboroughs of the world into paroxysms of spittle-flecked rage, so what else could I do but go? (Of course Joe's got a place right down the street from Ethical Culture, but I digress...)
I enjoyed the lecture, which was attended by 850 other DFHs (think about that -- 850 people lined up down the block to listen to talk by an evolutionary biologist on a Saturday night), despite the little spat reporting about it set off at Eschaton. I'll be honest. I didn't know much about Dawkins save that he'd written a book that was provoking fits in the faithful. That and the venue were good enough reasons for me to cancel my plan to jet to Lake Como with Mr. Clooney, but I digress...
So I've spent the last few days (and nights, as a spate of insomnia plagues me) clicking around the web reading about Dawkins and thinking about adding The God Delusion to the stack next to my bed. Meanwhile, via James Wolcott, I'm treated to a rather interesting and amusing anecdote in which the good professor makes an appearance. After you read it, watch this and note the characteristic wingnut victimology theme delivered in the inimitable nasal drone of a Richard Nixon apologist who's made millions selling himself as one of the smartest guys in the room.
If you're at all curious as to how to deal with a tiresome and relentless Republican hack like your boss Joe Scarborough, look no further than the 8 AM hour of this morning's broadcast, when your daddy showed how it's done.
Hello Regular readers, I apologize for my tardiness of which Dr. Atta J. Turk is all too familiar with but after a breaking of spring and a death in the family, I have returned back to my electronic homestead.
And I return to hear a vice president cavalierly dismiss the entire sentiments of three quarters of the American public with a single word, "So..." I come back to hear what must have been a slightly drunk prezneet Bush try to defend a failed and by any sane person's account -- an unmitigated disastrous and destructive war in the middle east.
I reenter and the economy is sliding toward depression where the two America's that John Edwards spoke about is being quite apparent. Where is the DAMN INDIGNATION over what will become $4 a gallon gas (or more)!!!
I am back. I promise my thoughts on politics, culture, and music. But man, I sure wish everything didn't have be in such a spiral when I did.
This from Nick Kristof is nice to see as well...for the actual depth and meaning of Obama's church is buried beneath small edits and snippets of Wright, not anything approaching the voluminous body of work:
Many well-meaning Americans perceive Mr. Wright as fundamentally a hate-monger who preaches antagonism toward whites. But those who know his church say that is an unrecognizable caricature: He is a complex figure and sometimes a reckless speaker, but one of his central messages is not anti-white hostility but black self-reliance.
“The big thing for Wright is hope,” said Martin Marty, one of America’s foremost theologians, who has known the Rev. Wright for 35 years and attended many of his services. “You hear ‘hope, hope, hope.’ Lots of ordinary people are there, and they’re there not to blast the whites. They’re there to get hope.”
Professor Marty said that as a white person, he sticks out in the largely black congregation but is always greeted with warmth and hospitality. “It’s not anti-white,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who’s white who walks out of there not feeling affirmed.”
Mr. Wright has indeed made some outrageous statements. But he should be judged as well by his actions — including a vigorous effort to address poverty, ill health, injustice and AIDS in his ministry. Mr. Wright has been frightfully wrong on many topics, but he was right on poverty, civil rights and compassion for AIDS victims.
Police said Wednesday 17 border guards have been shot dead by gunmen in different areas in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
The killings occurred over the last 24 hours, police sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The sources did not say whether the killings were carried out by the same gunmen and what the motive behind them was.
Criminal gangs and militias loyal to rival political powers have been active in Shiite-dominated Basra, 550 kilometres south of Baghdad.
In a separate incident in the city, Sheikh Abdel-Azim al-Idani, a close aide of senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was critically wounded in an attack by gunmen Tuesday, according to the same the sources.
Al-Idani's aide was killed in the attack.
But hey, those Black Preachers sure are crazy (when you edit their clips down into 2 minute segments).
"We have to keep fighting or the scary brown men will join with the scary black men and ruin all that is right about America, the most free & equal society on earth!" - Paraphrased Sean Hannity
Or any number of Catholic-Jew-Gay-America Haters you can talk to me about Jeremiah Wright.
Furthermore, if we are just going to extract a few minutes here and there of sermons then what can we find from those folks?
But my favorite for this perpetual double-standard has to be the long-time GOP love affair with Reverend Moon and the Moonies. For Moon is the self-proclaimed messiah on earth and has owned the Washington Times for about three decades now. Something that goes curiously unmentioned in our media while condemning some black people and their craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy ways.
And during this whole time he and the conservative media have been giving each other reach-arounds.
See how many times the Washington Times, a loss-leader if ever there was one, is quoted by these knuckleheads in condemning a liberal...especially on religious matters.
When you guys stop cupping Reverend Moon's balls, you guys can have some point worth listening to on extreme religious speech.
Said the man as he pumped his fist, if a man he be, though no woman would proudly claim Bush either. Let's just say "it" shall we?
"Feels good" it said five years ago today when it launched 'Operation Clusterfuck' and it's sequels, "Operartion Clusterfuck II:Electric Boogaloo"; "Operation Clusterfuck III: This time it's Personal"; "Operation Clusterfuck IV: Taxing The Next Generation"; "Operation Clusterfuck V: The Surge" and of course the now premiering "Operation Clusterfuck VI: Bush vs. Freddy".
Yes, it's been a delightful five years so far in the land where lauching voluntary wars and proclaiming everlasting Freidmans is the height of sound policy and if you disagree you're a big liberal fascist.
Thank goodness for those 4,000 dead Americans, 25,000 wounded, the $500 billion and counting all the way up to at least $3 trillion. And let us not forget the nameless, faceless, brown-people who worship a faith that has so few people boisterous about bombing us as the 'Great Satan' that we had to bomb a shitload of non-offending brown-people to prove that we aren't evil at all, just EXXXXXXXXXXXXXTREMELY freedom loving.
I'm getting a little teary-eyed...of course that might be the tap water.
Wow. If you read the papers, you'd think that the only thing New York governors were doing was, well, fucking, specifically people other than their spouses.
A conference to reconcile Iraq's warring political groups began to unravel even before it got under way on Tuesday, with the main Sunni Muslim Arab bloc pulling out and protesting it had not been properly invited.
The gathering, billed as the biggest of its kind in Iraq, aimed to bring leaders of rival factions together around much-delayed so-called laws meant to promote common cause between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
The Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc, had said it would attend but pulled out as dozens of political leaders gathered at a hotel in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.
"The Front will not attend the conference, not because it does not believe in reconciliation ... but because the invitations were sent to members of the Front and not formally to the Accordance Front," spokesman Salim al-Jubouri said.
We've advanced to the point from where only white people can be elected President to one where ... black people who are really white people can be elected.*
Where exactly have we advanced?
And thank goodness our media has advanced so much that a media critic can say this about a black man and think nothing of it or how it reads:
It's not that I think the Illinois senator should be tarred with every eccentric or anti-American ranting by the reverend
Four years ago, Atta J. Turk, Podiatrist to the Stars started Rising Hegemon with just a blog and a dream.
11,181 posts later...where's my fuckin' dream?
Anyhoo, here's an old one in remembrance of blog posts past:
photo via crazymaq Gilligan's Nation
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a feckless drip.
That started from a zygote spore, from this preppy's tiny dick.
The Chimp was a steely rocket man, his Condi brave and sure. The nation's fate set sail that day, appointed to an eight year tour, an eight year tour………
Al Qaeda started getting rough, the neo-con shit was tossed. If not for the doltage of the feckless crew, Bin Laden wouldn't be lost; Bin Laden wouldn't be lost.
The Fools took ground on the land of this wretched desert place,
with Gilligan, and Cheney too, the Spinning Ass, and the Wives, Beeeeeeeeee-Movie Star, the "Perfessor" and Crazy Ann,
There's hope for me yet. In addition to my continuing ability to be shocked, even in the face of the daily outrage that is BushCo, this account of now-NY Governor David Paterson's swearing-in has me all choked up.
Ah, a crisp fine March Monday and New York is reeling: not just under the weight of the hordes of drunken suburban teens poised to descend upon us for the St. Patrick's Day Parade (and yes, this NYT guide to NY's Irish bars really is penned by one "Seth Kugel"); not only due to a collapsed construction crane and the lives and buildings it destroyed; and not only from the demise of Bear Stearns and the 14,000 jobs soon to be left in its wake. We're also still reeling because of sex, specifically all that had by our soon-to-be (1:40 and counting) ex-governor, the illustrious and, apparently, prodigiously appetited Mr. Spitzer, who will make way for soon-to-be Governor Paterson shortly.
So long, Eliot. We hardly knew ye (really). In honor of your desultory slink away from Albany, Paul Slansky's got a new quiz up at the New Yorker. This one's about that perennial and timeliest of topic of s-e-x. A taste:
Match the sum with what it represents. 20. $20,000. 21. $1,600. 22. $40. (a) The credit left in Eliot Spitzer’s account with the Emperors Club V.I.P. (b) The amount that Buz Lukens paid a sixteen-year-old Columbus, Ohio, girl to have sex with him. (c) The amount that President Warren Harding’s mistress, Carrie Phillips, took in hush money from the R.N.C.
Answer -- and the rest of the quiz here. Happy Monday, people.
And these are the conflicting pictures of what $12 billion a month, hundreds of thousands dead, and the worst strategic disaster in 150 years will get you:
March 17, 2008, the man who once declared immediate victory. (AFP/Paul J. Richards)
March 3, 2008, same place, observe the real victor. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani (IRAQ)
I can't believe I watched that whole first two hours of 'John Adams' and got nothing.
Laura Linney's a great actress and all but you can't tell me if that was Julianne Moore playing Abigail Adams instead we would not have learned that the founders knew how to trim a hedge too!
(I'm starting to figure out those parts of the American psyche that elect George W. Bush...or allow him to be selected...I blame the Founders)
High gasoline prices and prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal headline Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to the Mideast, but fears about Iran's rising influence will be a key topic of his private talks at each stop.
Cheney loves him some anniversary tours.
I believe the 5th Anniversary is traditionally celebrated with exploding MOABs right?
Congrats America, the ménage à lame is traveling on your dime.
"If people here and in the Middle East were reassured that McCain isn't sort of itching for another war, that would be an important step," said Walter Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "When someone is one of the two finalists to be president of the United States, everybody wants to take a closer look."
They will get their chance during the seven-day, taxpayer-funded trip, which includes Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), two of McCain's closest colleagues.
They are also going back to visit Iraq and buy more rugs. The best thing for them is we already know what they'll say. So get your cutting & pasting ready!
Lieberman's WaPo & Wall Street Journal Editorial coming in May & June...see earlier editorials and hold them in abeyance until then.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.
Okay:
1. If FoxNoise has taught us anything, terrorists statements and actions are always "good news for Republicans".
2. And most importantly, I guess I'd be more worried about the FUCKING VICTIMS OF AN ATTACK then I would about my chances in the election.
But then, I'm not a delusional self-centered asshole...well a lesser one...like John McCain.
When I was a mere youth...as opposed to a strapping overweight balding middle-aged man at the height of his rather inconsiderable powers...I went to a black church in Minneapolis with a friend whose mother belonged to the congregation.
In my college years, as in the years since, I was not a church goer, I was raised in the bland and rather non-controversial realm of small town upper Midwest Methodism. A time and denomination I would describe as "Unitarians with a fear of non-commitment"
The sermons and services I grew up with were comforting banana pudding, we all left feeling marginally better about ourselves, mostly that the thing was over, but not too good -- that would require effort.
So walking into Urban Black Baptist Church was more than just going to say I've been there, it was a fascinating cultural experience -- and rather awkward. I was raised not to show strong emotions and here I was surrounded by people actively taking part in a church service, and actually singing, as opposed to mouthing the words or singing the female registers because I couldn't read music to save my life.
But I also heard the preacher talk about repression and other grievances at the injustice of the world -- caused quite clearly though impliedly (and with good reason) -- by passive-aggressive white people like me. It's not white guilt, it's reality.
Now, this was a bit disconcerting and my friend sort of apologized in a way because he could tell it was a mild shock to my sheltered middle-class sensibilities -- though at the same time I felt sort of sorry too because there was much of the preacher's anger that was quite justified and we all know it, whether we want to think about it or not.
Later, in an effort to be profound as all aspiring intellectuals of that age try to be, he summoned up his distillation of the whole thing:
"You see, White Baptists spent hundreds of years in this country justifying why the Bible, and Jesus have given them the blessing of being better than the black people they lord over, often those they owned. At the same time, they thought they were bettering us by forcing their religion upon us.
On the other hand, we accepted it gladly because we feel like we saw the truth within it of love and ultimate equality. Plus there was the benefit of "judgment" and we all knew how the people in the white church were going to be judged, and the black church service serves as the preview of coming attractions."
There was anger in the presentation that did not really exist in the reality (i.e. people were nice to me, not angry at me), what for me and most who went to my church was a one hour burden, was for much of that congregation a one-hour unburdening. Then we all went back to our usual lives of moderate sanity.
While we've poured the bulk of our troops and money and equipment into Iraq, where the real al Qaida isn’t, we've starved the effort to secure and rebuild and strengthen Afghanistan and bet all our chips on the wrong guy in Pakistan — two places where the real al Qaida and the real Taliban are growing stronger and more dangerous.
Benign neglect of your sworn enemies in a place such as Afghanistan calls for a combination of arrogance and ignorance that's not just risky, but also truly dangerous. These are the people who really did attack our country and kill thousands of innocent people on 9/11; these are the people who sheltered the real terrorists and defied us to do anything about it.
We let most of them and their leaders escape across the border into the wildest parts of Pakistan, where they've burrowed in, regrouped and are enjoying a recruiting boom that's sparked largely by the hatred born of our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Now they pose a threat to Pakistan itself, a nation that has a hundred or more real nuclear weapons, unlike Iraq, whose nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction existed only in the fevered minds of a frightened president and his arrogant accomplices.
The next time that we Americans start thinking about maybe electing someone with no known talent, limited useful experience and an IQ that's barely equal to his body temperature, what say we just leave the presidency vacant and the White House shuttered for eight years or so?
Rising Hegemon
(picture from USA Today) 
