Help Raise Funds for the Efficient Transport of "Spermatazoan-Americans"!

Oy, this is hysterical.

Does George W. Bush Know He's Going to Hell?

If George W. Bush is, as he claims, a born-again Christian, then for knowingly lying and repeatedly doing so, for signing death warrants, for waging war, for inflicting suffering on the poor, opening the environment even more widely to corporate rape, and on and on (the list is truly breathtaking), he must know that he's going to Hell. I mean, how many times does Christ have to continue to forgive someone, particularly one with such power to do good who instead knowingly chooses to do ill?

Of course, maybe George doesn't really believe in that stuff. It has been politically beneficial--brilliantly so--for him to claim he does, because Karl Rove understood the weight of a single unified block of anti-science, homophobic, speaking-in-tongues Americans was frighteningly large. But if Bush doesn't really believe he's going to Hell, then that means he's just punked the largest part of his constituency.

Either way, this life or the next, Bush ought to be damned.

Best Polite Indictment of the Corporate Press

I thought Craigslist founder Craig Newmark hits it on the head here:

But he believes the reason why newspapers are losing circulation is that too many traditional journalists are willing to quote politicians and business executives even if they're blatantly lying — merely for the sake of perceived objectivity. He'd prefer an "open source" model of journalism where legions of volunteers act as writers, assignment editors and fact checkers to challenge mainstream journalists.

"People are looking for attitude and guts in reporting — not full-on gonzo journalism, but hey, tell us what you think," said Newmark, who described himself as having Whig values — strong on defense, fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

Hardly some leftwing nutjob like me, right? Just when my hope was running dry as the corporate US media ignores the leaked British minutes, late on a Friday even, someone gives me reason to blog on, if only for its therapeutic value.

Is This How We Are to Be Judged?

Jesus Christ, if he comes back today, is not going to be pleased with us. The highlight:

Defence expenditure in the US will equal that of the rest of the world combined within 12 months . . . The US defence budget reached US$417.4 billion in 2003 - 46 per cent of the global total.

We're so fucked.

If the Leaked British Minutes Are Real, the Slide Has Begun

Rep. John Conyers (D, MI) and eighty-seven other members of Congress have written the White House about classified minutes of a secret meeting of the British prime minister and his advisors that occurred on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq, which have been leaked to the British press. So what's the big deal? The minutes, if real and not a plant, corroborate the claims by former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, former White House Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and other insiders that Bush and his advisers manufactured and altered intelligence to support their planned invasion of Iraq. See William Rivers Pitts' article for an excellent and concise summary and analysis.

Rep. Conyers' letter asks the following questions based on these minutes:

1. "Did the Administration lie to the American people about its intentions with respect to Iraq?"
2. "Did the Administration engineer a confrontation with Saddam Hussein to justify the war?"
3. "Did the Administration deliberately manipulate intelligence to deceive the American people about the strength of its case for war?"

If I was a gambling man, I'd wager on the following answers: 1-Yes. 2-Yes. 3-Yes.

Actually, to be allowed to bet on this outcome would be like past-posting, that is, cheating. No one should be surprised by this fact of lies and distortion, of course, at least anyone who read a foreign newspaper or watched a little C-SPAN in the last two years. The big question is whether something is to be done about it.

They gambled, and they lost. They lied, and they've been caught. With over 1700 coalition troops killed, thousands gravely injured, 100,000 Iraqi dead, several hundred billions of dollars spent, nothing but chaos on the horizon in Iraq, and the only reconstruction efforts seemingly focusing only on a prolonged colonial US presence, there is now a time of accountability.

If George W. Bush had one ounce of decency in him, then someone should replay his crotch-enhanced premature ejaculcation from the Viking jet on the deck of the carrier U.S.S Abraham Lincoln in May, 2003. Then he should be shown his minutes of inaction in the Florida classroom on September 11, 2001. A decent man would resign immediately. No, that's wrong. A decent man would not have got us in this mess.

The Thuggery of Bush, the Gutlessness of Kerry; Yes, America is a Land of Choices

Here's why John Kerry lost (if indeed he did) the election last November: he and the other Democratic National Committee dopes as well as the dense Democratic Leadership Council have tin ears. Remember when Kerry caved on the issue of gay marriage but said he was for civil unions? Well now he thinks that even in Massachusetts it's bad policy. From the Boston Globe:

"I'm opposed to it being in a platform. I think it's a mistake," Kerry said shortly after hosting a forum on his universal children's healthcare bill in Baton Rouge. ''I think it's the wrong thing, and I'm not sure it reflects the broad view of the Democratic Party in our state."

When in God's name will these assholes (and I mean that affectionately) realize that marriage is a civil institution, and that if two people of the same gender, or any degree between genders, or any extreme beyond genders, for that matter, want to wed and they are consenting adults to the union, then the state should give them their fucking license and let them comingle assets, share childrearing responsibilities, etc. And if it was presented to the "broad view of the Democratic Party" in that way, I am certain that it would receive broad support. But so scared is the mainstream Democratic elite of what they perceive to be overarching backwardness of mainstream America that they cannot embrace true liberal values and seek to expand freedom and equality. That's right, equality. Having a separate civil institution for the joining of households is bigotry, period.

Not only that, and this is something fiscal conservatives should like, having to craft separate laws, separate regulations, separate forms and so on is inefficient. Marriage is already defined. Use it as it is, extended to all. No bureaucratic folderol, no clerical confusion at city hall. Fifteen bucks, a couple of signatures, a blood test (do they still require those?) and off to the justice of the peace or the nearest ship to take advantage of the captain's vested powers.

But such an idea is too scary for Kerry, even after self-loathing gay whore Jeff Gannon/James Guckert wrote for Talon "News" that Kerry'd be the first gay president if elected. That's why the homophobe bigots get to keep stomping him. Even if he gets fragged in the cultural war, he's hiding instead of driving for the enemy with mayhem on his mind.

What happened to you since Vietnam, John?

Democrats, Republicans...wimps or crooks, take your pick.

Berlusconi, Blair, Bush: Yoked Together in Lies, and Soon in Disgrace

According to AFP news, Italian prime minister and Bush bud Silvio Berlusconi intervened to tone down Italy's military intelligence report on the shooting of freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena and the killing of agent Nicola Calipari by American troops.

Rome daily Il Messaggero reported "The head of government asks for changes", while the opposition-supporting La Repubblica claimed "Berlusconi imposes prudence".

"The report must be technical, only technical," it quoted Mr Berlusconi as saying, without giving any source.

"It can even be tough, but it must not in any event prejudice to the slightest degree political understanding with the United States."

Silvio has learned his lesson well--do not fuck with the political thugs who rule the United States. Learn from them on how to shape investigation reports, how to cow the intelligence services for political ends, how to lie to your nation to preserve your own power. But that cat, as the old saw goes, is out of the bag.

In Britain, Tony Blair is finding that his lies and secret plans are now catching up to him.

Mr Blair was challenged on whether he had seen Foreign Office legal advice in a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman on 20 April. He replied: "No, I had the Attorney General's advice to guide me." In fact, Mr Blair had seen the Foreign Office advice as early as 8 March 2002, in an annex to a secret Cabinet Office "options paper". That annex is published in The Independent on Sunday for the first time today.

Another cat slips from the burlap and yowls.

Will Berlusconi and Blair be evicted from office on these revelations? I wish I could predict that they would, that they would be dragged out of their chambers in shame and recorded in history as conmen and liars and traitors to their citizens, but I'm just a schmuck with a blog. However, wishes do come true sometimes. And as the light is shone into the corners of Italian and British government, revealing subversion of truth and the public will, and as it burns away the veneer that has covered up so much deceit about Iraq, perhaps as I type this, George W. Bush is cowering in his White House bedroom, praying to his twisted notion of God that the cleansing will stop on the far side of the Atlantic, that his allies in the media will not ask any of those mean questions, that his wife can tell some more ribald jokes to distract the public from the ugly truth of his misrule, that his daddy's pals will once again pull his ass out of the fire. He prays, he cries, he begins to shake as he realizes that his arrogance has dragged him over a sharp edge into infamy as the worst president in U.S. history, as a war criminal, as a betrayer of the American people, even beyond what they might have deserved for having been suckered in by the phony shitkicking demeanor and terrorized by the expanding control of his corrupt enforcement apparatus.

But the dam has cracked, Georgie-boy, you smirking little shit. Even the lickspittle Washington Post has opened a shutter on your darkness, giving light and space for an opinion that will only grow and strip from you the pretense and disdain and arrogance. In the spreading light will be revealed a pathetic little man who should have stuck with his dream of becoming baseball commissioner rather than the black stain he is now become upon the history of our nation.

What Should Be Front Page and Featured in Prime Time

Wouldn't it be nice if the pretty girls and boys on TV news or the uglier but no less irresponsible print pluggers could pry their wits off of the "Missing White Woman" story or the "Man Licks Custard off Missing Finger" story long enough to read the following paragraph published in Britain:

A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

The last sentence in particular is worthy of at least a $50 million-dollar Ken Starr-style special prosecutor. "Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," to justify an illegal war by selling the twisted information to the public through a kneepad press corps lining up to give an appointed president a rim job in the few instances when he deigned to show his ass to them. Yeah, Clinton's Whitewater thing and the blowjob really trump these sorts of shenanigans.

I'm so disgusted. I just hope Judith Miller of the New York Times and the others who pimped for the murder of so many innocents on all sides of this mess do the honorable thing, but of course, they're beyond honor, dignity, or truth. The First Amendment guarantees a free press, all right, but the provision of a free press lies in the hands of journalists, their editors, and apparently primarily under the thumb of their corporate overlords at GE, Disney, Viacom, et. al. The business of America is always just business, folks, and you're nothing but equipment for the death factory.

Enjoy yourselves.

Forget Wendy's Finger Chili, Forget Michael Jackson, Here's the Next Big Story Headed for Corporate Media Mass Distribution

If you were a television news producer, you might think that a constant fear would be having to resort to actual news, like the corrupting and corrupt presence of Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" Delay, or the continuing slaughter in Iraq, or the Republican assault on Social Security, among others. But truly, you never need fear having to devote airtime to anything of substance, because in a country this size, you can always find a guy who mistakenly licked chocolate custard off a severed finger. Here's a taste, so to speak:

Clarence Stowers said he thought the object he found in his custard was candy so he put it in his mouth to get the ice cream off. He told a Wilmington TV station that he rinsed off the object and "just started screaming."

Now this story just surfaced today, so let's see how far in gets in the mainstream corporate media. It has the sort of elements that our crack journalists love: amputation, fast food, chocolate flavoring, and it happened in the South.

Of course, I'm as guilty for writing about this and avoiding the really pressing issues of the day, but as I must remind my one or two random readers (if that many) I am not now, nor have I ever been, a journalist.

So for those drawing fat paychecks and getting their hair and makeup done prior to primetime pontification, what the fuck is your excuse?

The Value of Some News Blackout

I just spent a few days in a most bourgeois indulgence down in a remote part of Arizona. How remote, you ask? Well, the town of Winkelman, Arizona, is the nearest post office. At Aravaipa Farms the indulgences are substantial and ought to be, given the cost, which makes my hair stand on end, but all work and no play, yadda yadda. Even a leftie deserves a little break--that's why I rarely eat out or indulge in $5 vanilla lattes (as much as I have an embarassing weakness for them). Thrift begets these brief but intense luxuries.

But the point of this was that it was a total news and communications blackout for three days: no telephone, no Internet, no radio, no television. A small group of us hiked up and back in Aravaipa Canyon, then spent the other hours staring into the Sonoran Desert landscape, drinking good booze and eating lovingly prepared gourmet meals. The net effect: total mellowosity (yes, I'm making a new coinage) this morning now that I'm back in my mountain redoubt.

We've been visited heavily by Evening Grosbeaks in the clusters that are typical of the species, but whose appearance is erratic in this part of the country, and watching them in the yard while I was drinking coffee this A.M. helped draw out the calmness that not even thirty minutes of NPR could upset. I turned the radio off finally, because it was like sand in the lube during great sex. The sun as pouring through the budding aspens, my neighbors were coming out to pick up their newspapers or put out their trash or walk their kids to the bus stop, and life was flowing as it always does, but for once I was just letting it take me, instead of standing in the stream shaking my fist and screaming outrage.

Of course, mellow is not my fundamental nature. In America, as an American, outrage should be as normal as breathing, given the assault on church-state separation, attacks on social security, illegal wars for private profit, chickenhawk warmongers, institutionalized torture, antigay campaigns, and so on and on. So much to rage about, so little time on earth, alas.

But you know what? Taking a few days to completely ignore this shit really does do a body and soul good. Now as I page through Buzzflash, I am able to do it with a sense of calm consideration, without acid gnawing my breakfast out of my gut, with a perspective that the struggle is endless, yes, but that it is right and worthwhile so long as we can retain a connection to the mundane, the everyday, the tiny transcendent moments that make it so good to be alive, like watching a seasonal bird crack a sunflower seed under newly-leafed trees on a mountainside on a clear May morning. Even the Bushits can't take that away.

Irony-Free or Hypocrisy-Unconscious Zone?

Thank God, or the deity of your choice, or just the cosmic balance of the universe for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Last night was masterful in two respects. The first was in coverage of El Presidente Bushie's energy speech, in which he mentioned our need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, juxtaposed with a story in which Chimpie was shown walking hand-in-hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Strike one.

The next was Bush's declaration that our energy independence would be brought about through reliance on technology. At that moment, on CNN, the signal carrying the story flaked out, leaving a captioned black screen with no audio feed. The reporter at the CNN anchor desk, without missing a beat after the glitch, repeated Bush's statement in such a way that it was clear the anchor had essentially no understanding of the meaning of the text. Of course, in Britain they call them "news readers," which explains the intellectual vacuity and total lack of self-awareness that these powdered and blow-dried mannekins possess. Stewart, after showing this segment, shook his head and said, "What is this? Is CNN an irony-free zone?" And strike two for Bushie's energy plan.

Then there was Chimpie's proclamation that we should turn more to nuclear energy to supply our growing power needs, noting that no new plants had been built since the 1970s. Stewart's next bit had him asking why that might be, while a graphic of Three Mile Island was shown above him. He looked at it and then deadpanned, "Oh, yes. The accident." That's three strikes.

To be fair, nuclear power has come a long way with smaller plants--France is the technical leader there--and deserves at least a hearing, but you can bet that Bush's desire for "nukular" has more to do with ideology and monetary ties to the industry than to any real understanding of the issues involved. Shit, a man who can't even pronounce the word properly can hardly be expected to understand little things like meltdowns and disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

And then Stewart and crew turned to the issue of church and state, highlighting last Sunday's meeting of theofascist traitors (to be charitable) in Louisville, Kentucky, whose allegiance to invisible cloud beings trumps any notions of democracy, balance of power, or the separation of church and state in the U.S. Just go watch it here. My commentary will add nothing. This program is simply comic and news genius.

The tragedy, of course, is that it takes a half-hour show on Comedy Central to make up for all the failings of the corporate media in America. That's not so funny.

Lie Down with a Cockroach and You Get Filthy

El Presidente Bushie is wrapping his arms around Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" DeLay and smothering him with kisses for being such a good go-to guy in pushing forward his theofascist agenda of one party, one god, and one pocket for all the money. According to the WaPo:

With DeLay facing intense scrutiny of his travel, fundraising practices and relationship with controversial lobbyists, Bush yesterday offered the Texas Republican a timely show of support by inviting him to a public event and aboard Air Force One for a trip back to Washington from Texas. Scott McClellan, speaking to reporters before the flight, said the president supports DeLay "as strongly as he ever has."

Bush is doing for the Cockroach precisely what he didn't do for Trent Lott, whose mistake was a verbal utterance, however offensive, rather than alleged graft, corruption, money laundering, threatening federal judges, and trying to destroy the courts through defunding. Why is Georgie working so hard to embrace a creepy bug?

I don't think the answer lies too far from anyone's grasp. DeLay is to Texas politics what the giant flying cockroach is to the urban sewers of Phoenix, Arizona: comfortable, effective, knowledgeable, entirely ruthless and feared for that ruthlessness. While certainly no match pound for pound with the Bush family evil empire, what DeLay knows about the darker side of Bushit life and politics is a hell of a lot more potentially damaging than anything some blowdried, shitkicking Senator from Mississippi could ever reveal. Hence, DeLay is Bush's butt buddy while Lott was tossed out by his pants without so much as a handshake or a Lieberman kiss on the lips.

The WaPo continues:

If the DeLay controversy explodes into a bigger scandal, some said, it could taint the White House, especially with Bush going out of his way to align himself with DeLay.

Of course, the Post tries to obfuscate the larger possible explanation for Bush's behavior by saying this:

"He does not think DeLay has done anything wrong," said Charlie Black, a GOP lobbyist with close ties to the White House. "It's Bush's natural instinct to stand with him. There could be a risk, but it's the kind of risk [Bush] takes all the time."

Bush might also feel boxed in and left with little choice but to help DeLay, who has won the devotion of social conservatives, several Republicans said.

Bush hardly takes such risks all the time--he's a consummate coward, someone who never has to clean up after himself, who hides behind James Baker or others of his father's circle and who uses third parties to smear and degrade opponents so he can claim piety and ignorance in the face of any accusations. But he has to take this risk, because there is a greater risk in spades if he does not. DeLay is not a nice fellow, and he has loyalty only in direct proportion to its benefit to him personally. If he goes down, I think he will not hesitate to drag everyone he can down with him. And I think that what will follow will make the Monica Lewinsky circus of 1998 look like a warmup act for the greatest crash of a presidency in American history.

I can't wait!

Another Reason for Blogville

Good grief, this is so fucking hysterically funny I wet myself.

Why Blogging Matters

This article by Juan Cole is a must read, both for its explanation of why bloggers are vital to a free democracy as well as its indictment of the corporate media. Excerpt:

If we were mainstream media we would be wholly owned subsidiaries of General Electric, the Disney Corporation, Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom and so on and so forth. Ninety percent of cable channels are owned by the same companies that own the big television networks . . . If we were the mainstream media, we would be accountable to CEOs and editors and advertisers, all of whom have motives for suppressing some pieces of news and highlighting others. You might think to yourself that this is a diverse enough group that the story would still get through. But with media consolidation, fewer and fewer persons make the decisions.

And I'm with Mr. Cole on another important distinction. Let's quit saying "mainstream media" and call it what it is: corporate media.

Totalitarianism doesn't necessarily have a political party as its controlling force. Sometimes it can be called "General Electric" or "Wal-Mart."

Mutually Assured Destruction

So Senator Bill "Cat Killer" Frist sent a videotape to the "Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith" meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, yesterday. This provided a nice symmetry to his videotape diagnosis of Terri Schiavo some weeks ago. Frist may be attempting to become the first totally virtual political figure in his detachment in space and time from those things that he desperately needs for his future presidential run, but which he also understands are somewhat radioactive should the public zeitgeist turn against him. He did get burned on the Schiavo business. What competent physician would dare to diagnose the condition of any patient on the basis not of just a video, but video that was two or three years old? That didn't stop Frist, of course, because he recognized that to be sure the extreme religio-fascist wing of the Republican Party was firmly in his pocket, holding to medical ethics or just plain sense was unnecessary; in fact, he dumped his medical ethics faster than Newt Gingrich dumped his second wife to wed his intern.

But frankly, I'm puzzled that Frist and so many other Republicans are anxious to invoke this so-called "nuclear option" to deny the filibuster on judicial appointments. Methinks that they are feeling a little too cocky for their own good. Imagine that they jam this thing through. Then imagine that in the 2006 election a giant backlash against the looming theocratic juggernaut that Frist, DeLay, et al. are threatening causes the Repubs to lose their majority in the Senate and the House. Thanks to their castration of the ethics committee in the House and the nuclear option in the Senate, won't they find themselves even more disempowered than all their current whining would have us believe? Yes, even in the face of all this blustering by DeLay and the Christian right in a baldfaced grab for power, they cry about persecution at the hands of all of us meanie secularists who actually believe in the First Amendment. Hence the corruption of language in "Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith." As usual, they conflate faith and religion, specifically right-wing ideological religion, so that people of faith who are not right-wing ideologues are by default on their side as fellow targets of people like me. The way the religious rightwingers whine, you'd think we were forcing them to have sodomy parties with SpongeBob and Tinky Winky, paint themselves with the blood of virgins, and bite the heads off of Christian babies.

Atheists are the people who deserve to be complaining about unfair treatment. Mike Whitney over at the Smirking Chimp makes the case for atheism to be included in the mainstream debate. Atheism isn't even afforded the courtesy of mention in any discussion of church and state in America. I think that's pretty damned bigoted.

But getting back to the cluster-fucky in Kentucky. So what if they want to jam a few cartoon-crazy judges onto the federal bench? I'm beginning to think that maybe it's time to do a little Rope-a-Dope and let them be as extreme as they want to be. Let's get a real demonstration of what a Taliban Christian nation will be like with the James Dobsons and Tony Perkinses calling the shots. I'd love to see the real teeth and talons of these fanatical totalitarian absolutists who claim the completely delusional notion of talking to and for God and for all people of faith. People this mentally ill should be treated, not allowed to run tax-exempt organizations and influence crafty and amoral politicians like Frist and DeLay.

If Dobson and Perkins want to talk to their invisible friends and rant and rave about the coming apocalypse, let them do it where it belongs--in subway tunnels and under bridges, not with duly elected representatives of a secular democracy.

Should a Man Who Fears Being Sodomized by SpongeBob SquarePants be Planning the Demise of the Courts?

James Dobson, whose sphincter tightens like an anaconda on a piglet whenever he sees a yellow sponge, has been sharing ideas with the likes of Senate Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" DeLay on how to destroy any courts that inhibit their quest to establish a religio-fascist, one-party, one-god state in what was the United States of America. According to audio recordings of meetings with their drooling acolytes in March, Dobson and ally Tony Perkins (head of the Family Research Council, aka Fascists for Reestablishing Tradition in Women as Property, Non-Believers as Slaves, and Gays as Objects to Burn) seek to pressure the Senate to establish the "nuclear option" to deny the filibuster on judicial appointments. That's not news, but this is: In addition to this anti-democratic move, they want to get the Congress to cut the funding of any court that displeases them. According to the Los Angeles Times story,

"There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench," said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session.

What's another way to skin that cat? Tom the Cockroach provided it just six days earlier:

"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse," DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.

And Perkins admitted that he had made the suggestion to lawmakers the week before that:

Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was "prominently" discussed. "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them," Perkins said.

He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to "just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."

Now for those of you who think I'm just an anti-Christian bigot, let me point out that beyond casting aspersions on SpongeBob's bedroom activities and promulgating fear about his influence in getting young boys to bare their buttocks to one another, the warmth and fuzziness of Dobson and Perkins goes much farther. According to the LA Times story,

Perkins and Dobson laid out a history of court rulings they found offensive, singling out the recent finding by the Supreme Court that executing minors was unconstitutional.

Yes, Mr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins have been extremely upset that the United States has ceded to Somalia the honor of being the only country on earth that as national policy will put children to death. They should take comfort in our foreign policies, however, which in the past twelve years are partially responsible for the death of a half million Iraqi children, to which you can a some more thousands of innocent lives due to "collateral damage" in this failed oil grab in the Arab world.

But just to show I am as fair-minded as the next guy, I did find one thing that Dobson said that I agree with. His take on the whole SpongeBob affair was that he took a beating in the media because of a misunderstanding. He didn't say SpongeBob himself was gay, only that he promoted a gay agenda. As to the future,

"This will not be the last thing that you read about that makes me look ridiculous," he said.

Fuckin' A, Reverend. You got that right. I know I can count on you to keep the supply of the ridiculous coming in truckloads.

The Money Laundry

We know that Tom “Giant Flying Cockroach” DeLay is a seriously crooked human being in all aspects of his life, so the following bit from the New York Times is no surprse:

Like other charities, the DeLay Foundation, which operates from a post office box near Mr. DeLay's house in Sugar Land, Tex., is not required under federal laws to release a donors' list. Nor does it have to account in detail for how it spends millions of dollars in donations on behalf of abused and neglected children.

But forget that this is DeLay’s charity. Does anything strike you as, well, fundamentally corrupt about this business?

This is the definition of a money-laundering scheme. If a “charity” need not disclose its revenue sources, nor how it specifically disperses those funds, wouldn’t you think that it would be mighty simple to concoct all sorts of ways to shovel dough into your own pockets and those of cronies and bootlickers alike through phony events meant to raise money or awareness of the charity or its “cause.”

This stinks to high heaven, and yet it is another of these perfectly legal systems put in place by people in power who still aren’t satisfied with all the other means through which they fleece working people.

Does that mean that all of these charities are bogus fronts from graft? Not at all. But if that’s the case, why such loose rules? I would hope that any legitimate charity would have no problem opening its books so that donors as well as the IRS could rest assured that the money was being used in the best possible manner for the targeted group.

Of course, a key to why this is permitted under our federal laws may be the fact that the Cockroach is hardly the only legislator who has taken advantage of this mechanism. Read the article for yourself, and by the way, note how the “paper of record” manages to go as light on any investigative details as it can. When the Cockroach finally gets the bootheel crunch, and all the pus of his existence oozes out onto the linoleum, it’s going to be quite interesting to see how many other insect-like lawmakers start scrambling for cover and shedding their charitable skins.

A Nanosecond of Agreement with Karl Rove?

Karl Rove went to speak at a liberal arts college in a blue state, and when I read about his talk, I was flabbergasted that there was actually a smidgen of overlap between something he said and something that I believe. It's blowing my mind. Here's what he said:

Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat

If only it were true. Alas, where Rove despairs that the press has become oppositional, I can only hope that someday it will be so.

Certainly the press should try to be as objective as possible, but that's how they should report what they find. However, in the seeking of news and information they should be relentless in challenging power.

Quoting the journalist Joe Klein, Rove said reporters should understand "how easy it is to make mistakes" in government. But the president has been famously unwilling to acknowledge mistakes.

Bingo! That's why the press should operate without sympathy for those who seek power. Those "mistakes" are matters of life and death, comfort and suffering, and to give a pass on those decisions to people who scrounge and scramble and whore their way into the privilege of public office is a complete betrayal of what the press's role in a free republic should be.

Here we have a presidential administration that is without peer in secrecy, obfuscation, and intimidation in my lifetime. If the press doesn't uncover what politicians don't want us to know, how can we even begin to act as informed citizens? We don't need reporters who are collaborative with power; shit, the government press offices produce plenty of propaganda, and that applies to either party when it holds power.

Here's what I think should be the first lesson in journalism school for any reporter who wants to cover the public sector, as stated by the late, great I.F. Stone: "Governments lie." Democrat or Republican, it makes no difference. That's the starting point.

Another Reason to Consider Belief in the Antichrist

The ejaculatory white emission from the chimney over the Sistine Chapel has signaled that we now have a new Pope. Not much tension there before the climax, which indicates that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger plays pretty good inside baseball in the Vatican.

I'm not sure why I personally should care that the new pope is Ratzinger, now self-named Pope Benedict XVI. I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian for that matter, and the Vatican has always seemed to me to be more of a tourist curiosity than anything else. Granted, Pope John Paul II had a lot of clout, but not because he wielded actual power through economic or military means; rather, his power came from those millions around the world who willingly ceded it to him, acknowledging his "holiness" and using it to validate things like screwing without a condom because, in Monty Pythonese, "Every sperm is sacred." So if tens of millions of Africans become infected with HIV/AIDS as a result, well, gee isn't it interesting that the ascendancy of African Catholics in the last decades has been so rapid? Could there be some link between one thing and the other? A defensive maneuver by the white Vatican? Yeah, I know--I sound like a conspiracy nut.

I doubt that Pope Benedict XVI will soften any of the hard stances established by John Paul II; in fact, based on what I've read, if anything he will tighten the screws on Catholics worldwide, possibly bringing about a modern schism, which I think would be healthy. My American Catholic friends, who practice birth control, have sex for fun, are gay, don't go to confession, and so on, have always baffled me, because for me a church is like a club, and if you don't like the rules, then you start a new club, like Martin Luther did. Well, now it's going to be a challenge to this relaxed form of Catholicism as practiced in this country (Rick Man-on-Dog Santorum excluded, of course) when Ratzinger reaffirms his take-no-prisoners stance on homosexuality, premarital sex, birth control, abortion, and all the rest of the doctrine.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires," [Ratzinger] declared at a pre-conclave Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

"A dictatorship of relativism" is a nifty coinage. Funny how that would be more frightening than a dictatorship derived from an imagined god. Unless, of course, you have asserted the sole power to know the mind of that invisible great white father.

Boltin' Bolton in the UN

Why not confirm John Bolton for US Ambassador to the United Nations? Let's not hide the fact that as a nation we have become batshit crazy, screaming bullies who run roughshod over anything that gets in our way, chasing women down the halls in Russian hotels and throwing things like a crazed baboon. It would also present an honest face to the world that as a nation we have become liars, or at best obfuscators of fact.

The reason I've changed my mind about Bolton is because Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar are having some doubts, and that's a signal that Bolton is becoming a bit of an embarrassment, which is all the more reason to put him out there as a front man for the nation. Wouldn't it be great to learn that he had hurled his own feces at Kofi Annan in the men's restroom one afternoon after a heated floor debate on Iran's nuclear capability? Wouldn't it fit our national character if Bolton threatened Mohammed ElBaradei with a bullet through his kneecap if he didn't resign as director general of the International Atomic Energy Commission? Or if Bolton started a smear campaign about Niger's ambassabor's wardrobe and sexual proclivities? That's clearly his style, and isn't it precisely representative of this administration's approach to diplomacy?

I also think that the UN membership might enjoy a new sport: Bolton Baiting. They could award points based on who could goad the most outrageous display from the brush-lipped bully.

Let's put the pedal to the metal, America. Put Bolton in the UN. Let's get the shit flying fast and hard. This is what Bush wants, so give it to him. Enough rope, you know.