Department of Orwell

I've long thought it ridiculous that the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. It's time to rename it:

The fact that this militarist spin is 60 years old doesn't make it any less biased. I think it would be entirely responsible, neutral and accurate to take the word "defence" out of the non-sports lexicon. If the government won't go back to the Department of War, the least we could do is stop actively participating in this Orwellian farce in which the invasion of Iraq is carried out by the Department of Defence. Call it military spending. That's what it is. Anyone who's confident that fighting a war is a good idea should have the guts to call it by its proper name.

Doctor Mengele Would Be Proud

This entry shows exactly why we need a comprehensive investigation into torturing during the Bush years. I can't even say if it has stopped as we are still involved all over the world doing the same thing under Obama that we did under Bush. The only difference is that Obama doesn't have to start anything as the last administration provided enough to keep the security establishment going for years.

If there was careful measuring of methods and effects, this isn't a few bad apples but institutionalized war crimes.

Wither Obama

I never did believe the overarching "Change" hype of the Obama campaign. By record, he was fairly cautious and moderate, which is what attracted me to him. After the recklessness of the Bush years and the closing of the American Era (1945-2008), I thought he'd be a good person to get the nation to take a deep breath and reassess what we were doing.

I was wrong, so let the buyer's remorse set in.

I do acknowledge that he inherited a terrible situation, one that will take time to fix. Yet the state of the economy isn't the source of my disappointment, but his solutions are. The stimulus was a waste of money that cost over $300,000 per supposed job saved. The cash for clunkers was useless and providing a huge tax break to buy houses when the real problem is that there are too many houses and too much debt. Fighting the crash of a bubble by trying to inflate another one was a main cause of the crash in the first place.

I've also changed my view of some things in the last few months. I think we can only make the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan worse just by our presence. I thought maybe we could do some good in Afghanistan, but my mind has been changed by this book. We've done the damage and we're not the solution. Even if I believed we had the best of intentions, and I don't believe we did, the road to hell is paved with them.

He's not all to blame as we have a joke of a Congress and too many people dreaming up death panels and the like, but I refuse to choose between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

With that note, I do appreciate the more dialogue driven foreign policy of late and I do admire his biography. But the problem is 70,000 soldiers in Germany 64 years after the end of World War II, trillion-dollar deficits funding nothing useful, and a rotting infrastructure both tangible and not. And that's only part of it.

We'll be forced to deal with all of this, but I'd rather do it now before my country is bankrupt fiscally and morally.

Wither all of it.

Empire

Ever wanted to know how many soldiers the US has overseas and where. Here's the link. Why do we have 70,000 soldiers in German? Well over 100,000 in Europe. This needs to end.

Jesse "The Mind" Ventura

Aaarrrrggghhhhh, I Be Dead

Found here:

Nice Change of Pace

Talk about a 180 from before:

Mr. Obama walked into a meeting room in the basement of the capitol at 12:17 p.m., greeted by a moderate burst of applause from the audience of dozens of House Republicans. After a short while, another round of applause could be heard in the hallway outside the closed-door session taking place in Room HC-5. The loudest applause, attendees said, came when Mr. Obama decided to let the questioning go on, even though that meant senators would have to wait for him a while longer. The questioning lasted an hour.

“We had a wonderful exchange of ideas and I continue to be optimistic about our ability to get this recovery package done to put people back to work,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters as he left the House meeting.

As he moved to a similar meeting in the Senate, he added, “I recognize that we’re not going to get 100 percent of support, but I think everybody there felt good that I was willing to explain how we put the package together, how we were thinking about it, and that we continue to welcome some good ideas.”

Maybe it won't last or maybe it's not sincere, but I think and hope that it is.

What is the Sole of the Republican Party?

This article makes some good observations:

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

Flava!

We Finally Win One

The fifth presidential election of my voting life proved to be the charm. Granted, the first three votes I cast were never going to win (Paul Tsongas, my brother-in-law, Ralph Nader) but I was sure that the Shrub's mistakes would cost him the 2004 election. Unfortunately John Kerry had to be an überweiner and run a lousy campaign. That one really stung.

So it was with a jaded eye that I went to the Majestic (the old vaudeville theater) in downtown Madison to watch the election returns with like-minded citizens. They projected MSNBC onto a large screen and when my roommate, his girlfriend, another friend, his girlfriend, and I arrived, the anchors were pretty much just chattering as only a handful of states were called. We took our position near the back, got some drinks, and waited. Not many people were there, but slowly the crowd filled in.

As usual, we engaged in our sarcastic jokes and and whitless banter.

Then more results came in: Kentucky, New Jersey, Delaware. None of those were surprises. The surprise was the how close both Virginia and North Carolina were. I never suspected that North Carolina would ever go blue this election and of this writing it is still up in the air. Yet my roommate was sweating just the same. I knew how this election was going to end, but I couldn't quite sense it given the last few years.

Then Michigan went blue and the growing crowd cheered loudly at the news. While I was in line for a second round, the engineer brought down the music that was playing during the commercial break and put up the broadcast volume. The crowd went silent knowing that's when the talking heads called states. A face came on the screen and said "We have another state went for Obama ... Ohio. The dead silent crowd erupted. No Republican has ever been elected president without taking Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. That was the clincher for Obama and the death knell for McCain. Still, my lingering doubt was still napping on the sofa.

An hour later, when the West Coast polls closed, they called some state, maybe Colorado, for Obama, and then obligingly covered California in blue. We had elected Obama the 44th president of the United States. None of us in my group could quite believe it, even though the result was pretty clear for the past couple of weeks. The crowd went crazy and the cheer didn't die down for another half hour when McCain walked out to give his concession speech.

About half the crowd started booing. I yelled "SHUT UP!" as loudly as I could. The election was over. Even Grant let the soldiers of the Army of North Virginia keep their rifles, swords and horses after four bitter years of fighting. Now was the time to bury the hatchet and appreciate that democracy had worked once again. McCain gave a beautiful speech that made all of us recall the McCain of 2000 that each of us would have voted for had he made it out of the primaries. He was gracious and uplifting. It gave the feeling that maybe the old McCain would return as an elder statesman in the Senate, one that would be blessed to have him.

We waited a while for Obama to get to Grant Park for his victory speech. The screen showed images from around the country. One black woman was curled up in the fetal position crying, not believing the country whose Constitution once would have counted her as three-fifths of a person would elect an African-American as President. There were lots of cheering faces of all colors. The one that struck me the most was of a crying Jesse Jackson. Here is a man who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in 60's watching all he worked for bear fruit.

Barrack Obama's speech is one for the annals of the United States. He said all of the right things and he said them with sincerity. For the first time in my life, I not just felt, but actually sensed that the country was moving forward. I'm no idealist nor am I prone to fanciful thinking. I’m an optimist by nature, realist by nurture and pessimist by experience. It’s just feels like the world is new, like Christmas day when I was a kid. The anticipation is gone and the presents are open so I can just enjoy. I’m giving myself a couple of days of that before I let the reality back in.

Now if only that fucking Proposition 8 had gone down in flames....

Oh, sorry. Old habits die hard, if at all.

R.I.P.

The American Empire
1945-2008



In the end, my country will be better off because of it. I think the absolutism and consumerism will temper, if only because of necessity.

Time To Vote

I want to promote Brendon Etter for Mayor! Considering that the last people to comment on my blog were Brendon and Michael Kirby, creator of "Brendon Etter For Mayor" on Facebook, I'm sure my endorsement will ring far and wide.

What The !?!

McCain is out of his mind:

Republican 2008 presidential hopeful John McCain crooned the words "Bomb Iran" to a Beach Boys' tune in joking response to a question about any possible U.S. attack over Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons program.

"That old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran ... bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb," the Vietnam War veteran warbled softly to the band's "Barbara Ann" when he was asked when the United States would send an "airmail message" to Iran.



This is sick and shows the despiration of the neocon crowd. Instead of discussing policy, they may knee-jerk remarks.

Fucking assholes.

Wishy Washy Bastards

I always wonder who these people are who change their minds about presidents, congressmen, and lately, the Iraq war. You see the shrubs approval rating fluctuate by the month. Who the fuck changed his/her mind? Are about 20-30% of the electorate (or should I say those polled) that wishy-washy?

Approval for the Iraq War was huge in this country despite plenty of evidence that it's justification was off base. Add to that the tons of literature, commentaries, etc. that said occupying Iraq would be a nightmare. Hell, even the shrubs father said he didn't topple Hussein in '91 because there was NO EXIT STRATEGY!

The following lyrics are from the Clash. Like many of their lyrics, they're as important today as they were 30 years ago:

White Man In Hammersmith Palais Lyrics
(Strummer/Jones)

Midnight to six man
For the first time from Jamaica
Dillinger and Leroy Smart
Delroy Wilson, your cool operator

Ken Boothe for UK pop reggae
With backing bands sound systems
And if they've got anything to say
There's many black ears here to listen

But it was Four Tops all night with encores from stage right
Charging from the bass knives to the treble
But onstage they ain't got no roots rock rebel
Onstage they ain't got no...roots rock rebel

Dress back jump back this is a bluebeat attack
'Cos it won't get you anywhere
Fooling with your guns
The British Army is waiting out there
An' it weighs fifteen hundred tons

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution

Punk rockers in the UK
They won't notice anyway
They're all too busy fighting
For a good place under the lighting

The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny
Turning rebellion into money

All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway

I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
I'm the white man in the Palais
Just lookin' for fun

I'm only
Looking for fun

Um... 40 > 33

Autocrats

This is exactly why I loathe Hugo Chavez. When someone takes all of the power, this shit happens:

Less than 10 miles from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's mansion in Harare — the largest private residence on the African continent — Cleophus Masxigora digs for mice. On a good day, he told me, he can find 100 to 200. To capture the vermin, he burns brush to immobilize them, then kills them with several thumps of a shovel. This practice has become so widespread in Zimbabwe that, as a Zimbabwean journalist informed me, state-run television has broadcast warnings against citizens setting brush fires. Masxigora began hunting mice to support (and feed) his wife and three children soon after Mugabe began confiscating thousands of productive, white-owned farms in 2000, a policy that has since led to mass starvation. Not long ago, Zimbabwe, the "breadbasket of Africa," exported meat and produced what was widely considered to be Africa's finest livestock. Today, Masxigora tells me that each mouse nets $30 Zimbabwe dollars, about 12 cents, which makes him a wealthy man in Zimbabwe. "This is beef to us," he told me in August.

Bullshit!

This is fucking ridiculous!

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

This Could Get Ugly

I'm sincerely hoping everything works out ok, but I have a very bad feeling about this.

On a side note, Seymour Hersh has it down.

Steve Gilliard

Steve Gilliard over at the News Blog makes for some great reading, but also for some fun photo editing:


If I can get my ass writing again, I'll tell about the friendly honky tonk near my place that I went to last night.

Jon Stewart Speaks the Truth

I just renewed my iTunes multi-pass today. From this article:

Stewart routinely challenges his interviewees. When Anderson Cooper told him CNN has a "sense of mission," Stewart asked, "When's it gonna show on air?" His tenacity in holding on to the truth as his interviewees try to spin it showed clearly when he debated marriage with Bill Bennett:

JS: Why not encourage gay people to join in that family arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?

BB: Well, I think...gay people are already members of families. They're sons and they're daughters.

JS: So that's where the buck stops? That's the gay ceiling.

BB: Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a woman.

JS: I disagree. I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.