The Company He Keeps

"He", being John McCain, Republican candidate for President, "desperately ambitious ex-heretic," and all-around flip-flopping flim-flam man. No, not just the brain-addled, bloodthirsty, worst President in United States history at left, but also...

Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than [Joel] Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

Read the rest of Matt Taibbi's Full Metal McCain. Portraits of his charming supporters, too.

Free Party

I may have to send this guy a campaign donation.

More background on the crazy House race in Staten Island here.

Happy Father's Day, Vito!

Update: Fuggedaboudit! Commenter Terrible points to this story (which in turn points to TPM) with a late update: the father-son battle won't go down after all. Bummer, man.

List to Replace Russert

So, let us begin the horse race.  No, not that big election spectacular.  The media question of who replaces Russert at NBC?  For the most part, the speculative list mentioned at the NYT does not generate much excitement.  Joe Scarborough would be awful since he is such a partisan.  But someone like Keith Olbermann who is tough on Republicans and Democrats alike, that would be a great choice.

Who would be your pick?

We need to generate our own list.  I will start with Olbermann.  What do you folks think?

Last Best Hope of Earth, etc.

The Bush Administration, shitting on American Goodwill since 1/20/2001 (maybe earlier):

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment...

Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.

When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.

"Ah'm really impressed by this here Archie Triumph"

"But I'd like to see the monument you built for Jughead."

(AFP/Saul Loeb)

"Ah was expectin' ya' grabbin' somethin' else"

REUTERS/Jason Reed (FRANCE)

George Bush

He's soaking in it.

Cost by the Byte

File this under Uh Oh!  Once the door is open to charging "the heaviest users," the rest of the Internet will not be far behind.

Hey fella, can we keep the e-commons open?

Must-See TV (for Me)

Just now on Wee George:

Stephanapolous: "What can we do to improve our political coverage?"

John Edwards: (Thoughtful answer about not getting to substantive issues, preferring a brawl over a true debate, etc.)

Good answer, but in my fantasies I prefer:

Stephanapolous: "What can we do to improve our political coverage?"

John Edwards: "Well, we can start by not letting you or Charlie Gibson ever moderate a debate again."

Hey ... Happy Fathers Day to all you dads!

Read this

GITMO and the stain of us all ... but God forbid they get habeas rights, VIA McCLATCHY of course:

The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.


McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."

The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Behold the fucked up world Bush & McCain have given us. Unthinking, beligerent, cruel, unjust, and fostering the kind of hatreds towards us in their victims where nothing previously existed.

BLOWBACK, INC.

Offensive

Some news outlets, and some people, specifically FoxNews, are calling the flooding this week here in my home state, "Iowa's Katrina".

It's true there's flooding.

But let's not trivialize the disaster that was Katrina, with the circumstances in Iowa.

While Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines are all "cities", they are not exactly the size of New Orleans. And as tragic as it all is, the flooding has to my knowledge been almost exclusively property related. There is hardship, the disaster is nowhere near the magnitude and nature of Katrina.

But there are not more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands trapped in a hell hole without hope of immediate relief.

It is an insult to Iowans, but most specifically and importantly an insult to the victims of New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf region to proclaim this being anything like Katrina.

Almost made it through

The flood in Des Moines with little damage to the city, but not quite as a levee failed in Birdland, an older area of town filled with mostly working class or lower middle-income folks (i.e. where levees always seem to fail).

Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (home of the University of Iowa) have gotten it much worse.

To help, you can go here.


(REUTERS/Eric Thayer (UNITED STATES))

Just a Reminder: Impeachment

The Bush administration lied about the need for war in Iraq and continue to be dismissive about efforts to stop it (for example: Cheney's "so" among many other statements).  Soldiers keep dying while these cowardly chickenhawks fiddle away the last few months of what will be seen by any unbiased historian as the worst presidency in modern times.  An expression sang by Eric Idle about the FCC comes to mind.

We all must remember the staggering cost of these lies and the reason behind Mr. Kucinich's efforts to start impeachment proceedings:

1.  4,098 U.S. Military Fatalities in Iraq (too many sources to list)

2.  517 U.S. Military Fatalities in Afghanistan (source NYT)

3.  30,333 U.S. Military Maimed in Iraq (source: Dept of Defense Update as of June 8, 2008)

4.  92,067 Iraqis Reported Killed (source: Iraq Body Count)

5.  1,222,013 Iraqis Reported Killed (source: justforeignpolicy.org)

6. Devastating destruction of American policy leadership in the world (source: NYT, WAPO, any sensible interpretation of U.S. Foreign policy for the past 8 years or so)

7.  Add you own items to this list... there are so many reasons.

Think of this as a little friendly public service reminder.  These ARE crimes and several Bush and senior administrators (those Republican war enthusiasts) should be punished for them.  Please remember to call Mr. Kucinich's office and support his efforts to begin impeachment proceedings.  While you are at it, call your Senators and House members and demand they support the need for impeachment!

The Two Types

There are two types of people.  Those who make lists and then debate them and those who argue about them but don't make them.  As frequent readers to this fine site will know, I make many lists.  And I do not apologize for that tendency.  Not even a little. Lists help us organize our thoughts and that is a bit helpful when battling the wing-nut brigades.

After motoring around the Internet this evening, I stumbled upon this interesting list of the twenty-five music artists who have been the most influential.  While I quibble about some of the names on the list, it does have fairly wide coverage of many genres of music.

It is an interesting list.  What do you all think?  Leaving out bands seems a bit awkward to me.

It seems just like yesterday...

That George Bush had the gall to say this:

Our nations must ensure that Afghanistan is never again a safe haven for terror.

Which might have been possible if we had the troops currently in Iraq because Bush failed to accomplish just that.

And meanwhile,

About 870 prisoners escaped during a Taliban bomb and rocket attack on the main prison in southern Afghanistan that knocked down the front gate and demolished a prison floor, Afghan officials said Saturday. And in western Afghanistan on Saturday, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military vehicle, killing four Americans in the deadliest attack against U.S. troops in the country this year, officials said.

Let the Beatification begin

Atta J. Turk and I were talking today about the beatification of The Russert which has begun in earnest today.  Therefore it appears that when Cronkite dies we will all have sacrifice our first-borns.  So, what happens when Murrow level reporters pass this mortal coil?  Call me heartless but Peter Jennings was not the lead story on the networks when he passed.

Why?

Because Judi needs another tiara (and a summer house south of Montauk highway, and an apartment at 810 Fifth, and a regular table at Rao's, and every item from Christian Dior's fall 2008 collection, and a place in Vail, and an apartment in London, and a new BMW, and a purebred Sharpei, and a wing at Mount Sinai inscribed with her name, and a horse farm in Kentucky, and a foundation so she can do good works for those who have not).

Comparisons

Livin' like Republicans in microcosm:

Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt...The bulk of the McCains’ obligations stemmed from a pair of American Express credit cards that are held in Cindy McCain’s name. According to the disclosure reports, which present information on debts in a range rather than providing a precise figure, Mrs. McCain owed $100,000 to $250,000 on each card.

Another charge card, held by what was described as a “dependent child,” had also accumulated debts of $15,000 to $50,000. In addition, a credit card held jointly by the couple was carrying $10,000 to $15,000 in debt, the filing indicated, at a stiff 25.99 percent interest rate.

Meanwhile, the Democrats:

In July invested $100,000 to $250,000 into college savings accounts for each of their two daughters, who are in elementary school. The Obamas have often noted on the campaign trail that they had only recently paid off their own college loans.

WHAAAAA?

R. Kelly acquitted.

It's almost like the prosecutors trumped up a nothing case because the defendant was famous.  Or the case fell apart because the defendant was famous.  Or its like focusing media attention on a case because the defendant was famous.

What IS the pattern here?

Maybe uncool but...

I have to ask... When did Tim Russert become a saint?  The guy was a softball questioner to the Bush administration and spent as much time hawking his book as doing serious interviews. 

When did Russert become politico perfection?  And, one other question, shouldn't the flooding in the American Midwest be the lead story at the top of today's newscasts?

Now while it did seem like Russert did not have a great deal of anger.  His interest in politics seemed like it came from a pure interest rather than having a need to prove he was the big angry reporter.  Still, I have to wonder if all the attention spent on his passing is a bit much.  American news does seem to fixate on the morbid side of life.

Sorry if this seems a bit cold, I just don't think this is the most serious news issue today.  I do, however, send my condolences to his family and friends.   Please accept my sincere thoughts and wishes on your loss.