Quick! Give Pat an Aluminum Helmet!

What a day. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and this is my fourth posting, thanks to the wacky world we inhabit. ABC News reports that Pat Robertson is off his meds again and preaching apocalypse for rational thinkers in Pennsylvania:

Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck...In voting on Tuesday, all eight Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members up for re-election lost their seats after trying to introduce "intelligent design" to high school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Send this guy up to MIT, for God's sake, and get him outfitted for whatever it is that is screwing up his brain waves. It sure as hell isn't God transmitting this crap.

Bad News for Alien Abductees and Mind Control Victims

Thanks to a posting in Americablog, we've learned of some new findings from a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.

So should I switch to tin? Titanium? Disprobium? Simple lead or iron? Anyone out there know what will save me from these evil impulses?

Ali Scores Another Knockout

From the Washington Post, this is a delightful item:

Aretha Franklin was teary-eyed, Carol Burnett was teasing, Alan Greenspan was reliably taciturn, and "The Greatest of All Time" stole the show when President Bush bestowed the Medal of Freedom on them and 10 others in a White House ceremony yesterday.

Bush, who appeared almost playful, fastened the heavy medal around Muhammad Ali's neck and whispered something in the heavyweight champion's ear. Then, as if to say "bring it on," the president put up his dukes in a mock challenge. Ali, 63, who has Parkinson's disease and moves slowly, looked the president in the eye -- and, finger to head, did the "crazy" twirl for a couple of seconds.

The room of about 200, including Cabinet secretaries, tittered with laughter. Ali, who was then escorted back to his chair, made the twirl again while sitting down. And the president looked visibly taken aback, laughing nervously.

Was Ali making a political statement? In his remarks about the fighter, Bush mentioned the Olympic gold medal, the grit, "the Ali shuffle, the lightning jabs . . . the sheer guts and determination he brought to every fight." He did not mention Ali's very public opposition to the Vietnam War, which led the prizefighter to lose his boxing license for three years when he refused to serve in the Army.

Let me point out that Ali risked everything, including prison, because of his principles, and even as a veteran, I honor his choice. He was stripped of his heavyweight title because of his courageous stand against the war. Contrast that with Chimpie who evaded service in Vietnam by getting daddy Bush's help to jump over 1000 others to get into the "Champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, and then didn't even fill that obligation. The writer of this piece, Jose Antonio Vargus, sums the ceremony up perfectly with this:

Ali, dressed in a suit, barely cracking a smile, received the loudest and most sustained applause of the day. And the always quotable man who said "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong" and "I am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates" delivered the most striking moment without speaking a word.

Happy Veterans Day

To all who have served, bless you, for you have done your duty in sacrifice, even when those who hold the reins of power have abused your loyalty and faithfulness. As an instrument of policy, the military must be under civilian control. Sadly, when the civilian control is corrupt, greedy, and without military experience of their own, grievous harm is done by and to our fighting men and women under arms. It is paramount that we always use force as a last resort, that we employ it wisely and only necessarily in our defense and never as an imperial power, for the private gain of corporations, or the religious idealism of theocratic extremists.

Have a good day. My wife always makes meatloaf for me on Veterans Day, with real mashed potatoes, good greens (Brussels sprouts!), and maybe even devils food cake with chocolate icing. Enjoy yourselves.

Chimpie, Karl, Dickless, Wolfowitz, DeLay, the Hillbilly Heroin Homeboy Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Chickhawks--hang your heads in shame, then get down on your bony knees and thank your god that those other brave souls died in your place so you could espouse your hate-filled war whooping like little boys playing soldier. And no, Chimpie, you MAY NOT put on your flight suit. Go to your room.

More for Your Entertainment Dollar

Oh, goodness, this is wonderful news for rhetoricians and linguists everywhere. Courtesy of CNN:

White House officials are determined to reverse President Bush's poor poll showings on the topics of Iraq and "honesty and trustworthiness."

What they're going to learn is that honesty and trustworthiness are like virginity--despite "born again" Christian claims of assertion to the contrary, once you're fucked on any of these, you're not honest, trustworthy, or hymenally intact, whichever the case may be.

I'll be charitable--everyone is entitled to one mistake, even two mistakes. But when the evidence stacks up for dozens of breaches of the public trust, or if your significant other is caught in bed with someone else thirty times, or if a car salesman's statements are provably wrong ten instances in ten minutes, reestablishing credibility, fidelity, or belief is impossible. But hey, nobody accused the White House of living in a world governed by logic or common sense.

White House aides, who agreed to speak to CNN only on the condition of anonymity, said they hoped to increase what they called their "hit back" in coming days.

The officials say they plan to repeatedly make the point -- as they did during the 2004 campaign -- that pre-war intelligence was faulty, it was not manipulated and everyone was working off the same intelligence.

Yeah, that'll work--repeatedly shout what has already been discredited and no one but the dimmest fanatic of Chimpie is going to even hope to believe. How are they going to do it?

They hope to arm GOP officials with more quotes by Democrats making the same pre-war claims as Republicans did about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

This is actually good news for the more leftist radical among us, because it will help to tar the "moderate" Bush bootlickers in the Democratic Party with the aiding and abetting brush. Shitheads like Biden, Lieberman, and, yes, Hillary Clinton, political opportunists all who voted for war will be exposed for the traitors to the people that they indeed are. Perhaps some fresh blood with real democratic ideas, with real desire to serve the people, will at last ooze into this sclerotic political whorehouse.

But in the meantime it's going to be hysterical to watch the backpedaling, rationalizations, and pretzel logic of these assholes squirming together under the new light of American awareness.

Welcome to Your Police State

From today's Washington Post comes a chilling report on how determined this administration is to use any means necessary against ordinary citizens to consolidate power. You think you have a right to privacy, established by your Constitution and protected by those sworn to uphold it? Well, thanks to the Chimpie gang's broad reinterpretation and reimplementation of old policies and their railroading of the PATRIOT Act greased by fearmongering of willing hysterics in the mainstream media, if you have been missing life under Stalin, don't be so blue. In Connecticut, a good citizen just doing his job was approached and intimidated by FBI agents wanting him to violate privacy rights of other innocent individuals and remain quiet about it under penalty of law.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

But wait, you protest. The courts require certain standards of suspicion be met, right? Oh, you are so, so very naive. Remember that this is a government run by liars, thieves, murderers, war profiteers, and totalitarians.

ssued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that they are also horribly incompetent--the Chimpettes have no proof that it even works!

You see, these are motherfuckers who want power. That's it. They are not concerned with security or the rule of law or the protection of the citizenry. What other conclusion can one draw from the insistence on a practice that is unproductive, anti-American, and in fact ties up valuable investigative resources that should actually be looking for dangerous people with evil designs on our nation.

Here's a tip: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. Any cabbie can take you there.

Exhibit # 13, Your Honor, on Why Cheney Is a War Criminal

From today's Washington Post comes an article explaining the internal war regarding the use of torture, and I have to ask you all, why are we even having such a debate? Isn't the issue absolutely clear? Apparently, we have Americans in leadership positions who think that any means should be available, just in case. From the WaPo article:

Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.

Did you catch the incredible contradiction in Cheney's thinking? On the one hand, he finds the UN treaty against torture "vague and open-ended" while simultaneously wanting to give the president "nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists," which is also vague and open-ended. What the fuck?

Of course, you can't expect the WaPo to point out the hypocrisy that is so obvious within a single paragraph, because I'm sure that it will be readily apparent to all those news screaming heads on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and--of course--FOX. Since that's where America gets its debating points, I'm sure they'll be fully informed of this dark, bloody stain on our national reputation abroad.

Dick Cheney is a fascist and a criminal. My God, I hope we have our own version of the Nuremburg trials. Who wants to pull the lever that makes this crooked motherfucker's neck snap? We'll have to have a lottery for that privilege.