Despite All My Rage I’m Still Just a Rat…

From the G-8 Summit-

Fresh from blocking any real efforts to tackle climate change, our illustrious President acted more fratty than ever. Take it away, Telegraph…

As President Bush was preparing to leave the final private meeting between the world leaders at the G-8 Summit, he dropped this gem:

“Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

George W. Bush is an asshole.

From the ‘Homer Simpson is Smarter than George W. Bush’ file-

George F. Will takes a break from being a smarmy libtard to extol the virtues of beer:

..the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had…This ability is controlled by …genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

Well, break’s over. Time to veer off into Brave Libertarian/History Whitewasher territoy:

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Not unreasonably. See, we didn’t commit horrendous genocide by virtually exterminating the Injuns, it was their fault. They should have lived in towns and drank beer, like us good God-fearing Protestants…

Oh, well, at least there’s this line:

“Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.”

Heh, indeed.

And finally, there is hope for married couples in their 40’s-

A wife gives her husband a unique 40th Birthday present: Sex every day for a year.

“One girlfriend said I must never, ever tell her husband what I was doing in case he got any ideas.”

Real nice.

She had been expecting whoops of delight and much punching of the ceiling when she told him of his gift…”to my horror, he declined the whole thing, saying that he didn’t want me to feel that I had to have sex with him - like it was some sort of duty…I was quite deflated.”

Whoops of delight and much punching of the ceiling? Is she married to this guy?

But I digress.

the couple don’t claim a 100 per cent success rate but say they had sex roughly 28 days a month for 12 months

Not bad. Not bad at all.

“When I started looking at this, though, I realized there was ample time for sex; we were just putting everything else first.”

Hmmm…

“I gained just as much from this as Brad and, if I’m honest, it was as much for me in the first place. I needed the boost in confidence it gave me.”

Sing it, sister!

“One of the saddest moments when I was thinking about my marriage was when I realized that sex with Brad was the only thing we shared that was unique to us.

It was what made us more than roommates, and yet I was denying our marriage that aspect.”

Amen.

Photo Cred - AP

The Nuremberg Defense

Go ahead, call it out. I’ve Godwinned my post before even getting past the title.

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was “only following orders” (”Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Our Senate is going to come back next week and vote on the new FISA bill. For those of you that don’t know what that is, here’s a brief overview via Bill Moyers:

On January 27, 1975, the Senate, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and alarmed by recent allegations of intelligence service misdeeds, voted to establish an 11-member investigating body along the lines of the recently concluded Watergate Committee….

In reaction to the Church Committee reports pushing for oversight, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which established a secret FISA court responsible for issuing warrants for domestic wiretapping activity. The FISA court consists of seven judges appointed by the Chief Justice and who serve for seven years.

In December 2005, the NEW YORK TIMES reported that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on American phone calls and emails without obtaining a warrant from the FISA court. That revelation was met with consternation, and investigations, by many in and outside of the political realm.

In August 2007, a temporary amendment to FISA passed called the Protect America Act, which as President Bush explains, modernizes FISA by “accounting for changes in technology and restoring the statute to its original focus on appropriate protections for the rights of persons in the United States - and not foreign targets located in foreign lands.”

Bascially, the FISA bill passed in 1978 provide a framework in which we can spy on people, but supposedly prevents the President from abusing his power and spying without review from a court (exactly what Bush has been doing). The consequence for violating FISA is (again, supposedly) a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Right now there are more about 40 civil lawsuits against the telecoms for breaking the law and allowing the government access to huge amounts of our communications. Their defense? We we only doing what we were told. Sound familiar? Remember that the telecoms have large legal departments, and don’t do anything unless it is reviewed by these lawyers in order to expose themselves to minimum liability. There is no way they thought this was legal (unless their legal departments consisted of Liberty University hacks).

When the Senate gets back in session on Monday, they are planning passing an update to the FISA bill that the House passed last week. It is a complete sham. They want to retroactively immunize the telecoms for breaking the law because…wait for it…the telecoms were only doing what they were told.

Did you know that the government started the wiretapping program 7 months before 9/11? We know this because a former CEO of Qwest, Joe Nacchio, was tried and convicted of dumping stocks. During the trial it came out that on February 27, 2001Nacchio had a meeting with a representative from the NSA to discuss the Groundbreaker program, essentially the farming out of the NSA’s Information Technology to the telecoms. It was estimated that the program was worth 2-5 billion dollars in new revenue for the telecoms. (Many critics have said that the Groundbreaker program was actually just a cover for massive illegal wiretapping.) Here’s Naccio’s lawyer, Herbert Stern:

In the Fall of 2001, at a time when there was no investigation of Qwest or Mr. Nacchio by the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, and while Mr. Nacchio was Chairman and CEO of Qwest and was serving pursuant to the President’s appointment as the Chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, Qwest was approached to permit the Government access to the private telephone records of Qwest customers.

Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act.

So Joe Nacchio says no (Qwest is the only company known to have raised objections) and six years later he is rotting in jail.

So our congress is attempting to codify the Nuremberg Defense. And although months ago this issue came up Barack Obama pledged to do anything to stop retroactive immunity, now that he has the nomination he has decided it is good for the country and he supports it.

What really concerns me is that when discussing this issue with friends, I have heard the “They were just doing what they were told” bullshit. Check out this comment from an excellent post about Obama’s position on this matter from the American Conservative:

I work in private industry, in construction, and if the government came to me and insisted that I build something that was vital for national security but violated a few laws, and was assured that this wouldn’t be a problem, and that if I did this I would be rewarded, and if I didn’t that I wouldn’t get many government contracts again, what exactly should I be expected to do?

That is some scary stuff. But he keeps digging:

If we make our entire system of laws dependent not on the government following the law, but on private individuals bucking the government’s inducements and extortions, we have a crazy system of checks and balances in place.

Yeah, there something crazy going on here all right. But it doesn’t have to do with checks and balances, it has to do with assuming that the government always has our best interests at heart.

I’ve got news for you. They don’t.

My first political contribution.

I gave $25 to Darcy Burner today. This is the first time I have ever given a candidate money.

Yesterday her house burned down due to faulty wiring in a lamp in her young son’s room. The family got out alive, as well as their puppy. The cat didn’t make it.

But that isn’t why I contributed. I contributed because she is a great progressive voice, but even more because of the nasty comments trolls were leaving over at Horses’s Ass.

I really am tired of watching this country go down in flames because the ‘adults’ running the country constantly act like children. I admit I like to be silly and irreverent, but I try and maintain a modicum of decency to those around me (which is no small feat, and which I regularly fail). But as a father I feel ashamed to see our country governed by people with the psychology of children.

So if you can, drop a couple of bucks in Darcy’s tip jar. Nothing would make a wingnut more mad.

And yes, that is the shirt she was wearing when she was awakened by the flames. If you aren’t aware of all internet traditions, it means End War. Photo by Ellen M. Banner of the Seattle Times.

About My Awareness

Let me show you:

The backstory is here.

And as to the case of all internet traditions (all of which I am aware), there’s a blog.

Hoo boy.

Sabrina Poirier, a student at Pensacola who withdrew in 1997, was disciplined for what is known on the campus as “optical intercourse” — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as “making eye babies.”

tbogg has the rest.

h/t Righteous Bubba

I guess it’s time to arise from my stupor and write someting down.

Spider Hole picture by Bill Finger

Many thanks to the positive words from my commenters. I have been really down, coming full circle from an anti-establishment Nader supporter in 2000 to believing that the Democrats actually might accomplish something in 2006 back to someone that is actually considering not voting.

I know. How could I? Isn’t Obama the great Black/White Hope? And isn’t not voting for Obama a vote for McCain? And why not vote fro Nader again?

I guess my answer is: Fuck it. Straight up. Fuck. It. I have spent the last couple of years pouring over the blogosphere, learning all I could about where we are today. Let me tell you, it’s not pretty.

The experiment has failed. Even with the amount of time and effort our Constitution’s framers put into designing checks and balances the corporations and moneyed interests run the show. Our Great Hope, Obama, is now shamelessly tacking to the Right in order to shore up his chances of winning. Motherfucker didn’t even bother to show up for the first vote on the FISA bill, and has now switched his ‘Against Immunity’ position to ‘Hey, Whatever Will Get Me More Votes’. We have the most unpopular President in history, and the so called “opposition candidate” has publicly said he will vote for the early X-Mas gift for Incurious George and Big Dick, Telecom Immunity.

As I write this, I have Pandora on, the After the Gold Rush Channel. Neil has spent his life rallying against this bullshit, and now I’m feeling like maybe this is exactly where the powers that be want me to be: Disillusioned and feeling utterly powerless. I just don’t know what to do about all of this. The ‘re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic’ metaphor seems quite appropos right now.

All empires go through a life span. I don’t have the links right now because I forgot to bookmark them, but I have seen analysis after analysis comparing the United States to the historic Empires and showing that we are on the downward decline towards irrelevance. When big countries pick fights with small countries in order to keep fueling the nationalistic impulses of the people and greed of the rich then the gig is up. Fear for fear’s sake. Keep the people so spun by rising cost of living, the impossibility of health care, the difficulty of the job market and they won’t question our leaders even when we catch them elbow deep in our grandkids’ cookie jars.

Nothing worth having is ever easy. Hard work will set you free. Think in generational terms, not in immediate gratification. Good advice, but how do you work hard when you aren’t sure where the work lies? Do we work tirelessly to get progressives in the government, only to watch them eventually be corrupted by the sweet seduction of power and money? Do we risk being disappeared and work for actual revolution? Withdraw from society and arm ourselves to the teeth? Come up with a scam to get rich quick and retire on a tropical island? Give in and start a porn company to wring some of the last change from our fellow citizens’ pockets? Drink (even more ) heavily? Head to the hills and farm herb?

The last is my first choice, by the way, but I don’t see it working for my children. Plus, right now I think that giving the government a reason to incarcerate me is foolish (or just a paranoid delusion?) I don’t know.

As is human nature, I am comfortable enough to complain, so I do. I really am blessed. I have my health, and my daughters are growing to be amazing and brilliant. A superpower is not bombing my home town. Some paranoid freaks are not building 30 foot walls separating me from my friends and neighbors. We don’t have a President violently pushing his opposition out of the race. We don’t experience ethnic cleansing, or the terror of having to flee our homes in the dead of night for fear of losing life or limb.

I guess things are pretty good. I have completely lost faith in our government, even our form of government, but by all other metrics I am a very lucky human being. I’ll meditate on that for a while and see if I feel like participating in our ‘Democracy’ when I come out on the other side.

Rock Bottom

So I’ve lost faith in our system, big-time.

I am at blogger rock bottom.  Everything I want to say I instantly come up with a hundred different reasons of why what I wanted to say is dumb,  has already been said, or is hypocritical, or won’t make a damn bit of difference.

However, I will miss George Carlin.  I think he was brilliant.

Obama Screws the Pooch.

It has always bothered me that Barack Obama supported Joe Lieberman in the 2006 congressional race against populist Democrat Ned Lamont. But now he has gone too far, and the facade is getting a little thin for my taste.

The back story: John Barrow is a Representative from Georgia. A Blue Dog Democrat. Which is code for a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing, also known as democrat that almost exclusively votes for whatever bullshit the corrupt and way-past-their-shelf-life Republicans come up with, or Republican-Lite, if you will.

The latest steaming stinker to come down the Republican chocolate highway is their attempt to immunize the telecoms that knowingly broke the law in order to assist the Bush administration with vacuuming up all communications between all Americans in order to mine this information for…( information on terrorists?) Anyone with a basic understanding of what is allowed relative to information gathering in this country knows that the FISA court created by the FISA bill written in the seventies is supposed to be the exclusive venue for getting permission for this kind of surveillance. It is a felony, according to the FISA bill, to go around the conventions set up in this bill. Which the telecoms knowingly did because the Administration asked real nice. Which is illegal.

So right now, our congress is trying to retroactively immunize these telecom companies (there are currently dozens of lawsuits against the telecos over this matter, with a huge potential financial penalty at stake) from any current or future lawsuits pertaining to their assistance to the Administration. Effectively, this would cover up any wrong-doing of government officials that may come out in the discovery phase of any number of these trials, as well as give the green light for any corporation to violate any law )if the Administration asks real nice). I personally see this as a crucial piece in the puzzle for having a true fascist system in the United States. If citizens have no recourse against corporations, and in turn government officials, when their guaranteed rights are trampled on, then we have no more guarantee for our rights.

Back to Mr Barrow. He is one of the leading voices in the Blue Dog caucus to lend his full throated support to retroactive immunity, among other Blue Dog BS. He is also being challenged by a progressive state legislator named Regina Thomas. A black woman in a district that had 70% of it ballots cast in past primaries by African-Americans. So of course Obama is supporting Thomas, right?

Wrong. Obama just finished taping a 60 second radio spot for John Barrow.

“We’re going to need John Barrow back in Congress to help change Washington and get our country back on track,” Obama says in the 60-second ad.

Bullshit, Barry!

I don’t know what to say. I was feeling really positive about Obama at least being able to help us step back from the fascist precipice. But the company he’s keeping is a little, well, dubious. Don’t get me wrong, I’m rather terrified of Old Man McCain. But I consider this strike two for Obama. If he’s going to vacuum up votes by putting on the progressive mask, but act as an enabler to the system that has gotten us to this woeful place in which we currently reside, I will not stand by him.

Change we can believe in?

Civil Rights are Civil Rights

The first same-sex couple to marry legally in California, Lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, have been together for 55 years.

h/t Jill @ Feministe (this picture is when they were illegally wed by Gavin Newsom in 2004)

I sincerely believe that equal rights for all really means just that. Not “Equal Rights for Those Who Believe and Act in Ways That I am Comfortable With”.

What is homophobia about, anyway? It is about sex, pure and simple. How are a gay couple any different from any other couple? The slots and tabs. That is it.

I never really want to think about most of my neighbors having sex. I mean, come on. What else would I be able to base my hatred on the homos next door other than their bedtime proclivities? There are plenty of straight kinks that I would rather not assign to the neighbor I nod to every time I see them. Really. Who wants to know that the sweet overweight couple two doors down are into…well, you get the picture. So why would a gay couple next door be any different than a straight couple?

I believe that ‘conservatives’ have two main deficiencies. Projection and controlling their creative visualizations. With projection, they always want to project their beliefs on everyone else. Even more so if deep down they like what they are supposed to hate. Sort of a smokescreen effect, if you will. Yell loud enough about how you hate X and people will probably think you are the last candidate for engaging in X.

With creative visualization, well, we’re back to the neighbors. If all I saw was sex when I encountered other people, I would probably be driven half mad by the cavalcade of imagery. Especially if I had spent much of my life trying to convince myself that I was morally superior to everyone else all the while wondering deep down what it would be like to be forcibly taken by a large, sweaty black man. (I’m looking at you, Missy Graham)

I have pretty good control of my visualization. If they’re attractive to me, I might go there mentally. If not, ewww. No. So I really don’t care how the scene works for you. Even if it involves goats. If fact, I’m probably more inclined that you keep it to yourself, whatever your ‘orientation’. (Unless you are whispering it in my ear, that is. Full disclosure: I <em>heart</em> naughty.)

So back to the California. Good on them. Living up to our reputation of a nation of freedom is hard work, but we have to keep trying to ensure that all people, from white to black, rich to poor, totally straight to flamingly gay are treated Equally. As in the same. All the time.

-From the San Francisco Sentinel.

On the same subject, see my posts on Absurdity Ad Infinitum and The New Gay.

Eisenhower was Right.

Dwight D Eisenhower was a wise man. And a Kansan. I’m not sure which came first. But suffice to say he was very prescient about how the companies with a financial interest in war should be closely watched to make sure they don’t drum up conflict to pay their paychecks.

Take it away, BBC:

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

Who could have ever predicted this?

Seems that that 23 billion dollars went missing, but all parties in cases involving the lost money are under a gag order.

In the run-up to the invasion, one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7bn that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.

Go figure.

Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, said: “The money that’s gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, it’s egregious.

“It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history.”

If only one of our leaders had been wise enough to warn us about this.

D’oh!

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

To be fair, I guess, the Fifties were a long, long time ago…