September 28, 2007 archive

Jim Webb Does Not Get It . . .

Green Greenwald wrote:

At the beginning of this year, when the Democrats took over Congress, it would have been unthinkable — truly — to imagine the Congress expressly authorizing the use of military force against Iran. It was always certainly a strong possibility that the administration would find a way to provoke a war with Iran and then argue that they need no further authorization on the ground that the current Iraq AUMF implicitly authorizes them to defend our mission by attacking Iran.

Stranger in a Strange Land wrote that Jim Webb gets it:

I share Jim Webb’s concern that, given the opportunity, Dick Cheney will not hesitate to use the vote on yesterday’s amendment as part of his justification to attack Iran should that opportunity come to pass.

The opportunity, as Greenwald points out, is the continuing Iraq Debacle. And Jim Webb will not do what must be done, not fund the Iraq Debacle. Which means Jim Webb does NOT get it. No Democrat in Congress can truly claim to be doing all they can to end the Iraq Debacle and to prevent an Iran Debacle if they continue to support Bush’s war by funding it. Webb is supporting the Iraq Debacle as he votes to continue to fund it. More.

Drunk, Drugged & Disorderly in Alabama with “W”

” We probably kept the state liquor store in business.”

  ~Devere McLennan, GWB drinkin’ buddy

I don’t blame them. I was stationed in Alabama after returning from Vietnam in 1970 and about the only entertainment I could find was getting wasted and going to wrasslin’ on Friday night at The Peanut Center in Dothan.  I did get to meet Andre The Giant down at the shopping center. That was cool.

I lived in a large pre-Civil War home in the hills outside Fort Rucker with a varying number of returning vets and girlfriends.  Ahhh…good times.  I won’t mention the name of the town as I believe Charlie the Town Cop still has a warrant for me. He often stopped by while we sat on the porch to show us the stack of warrants he had prepared for us “if he needed them”. He never used them, but he could have at any given time and hauled our asses in for a variety of reasons.

None of our grandparents were Prescott Bush you see.

What are you reading?

Over at big Orange, I regularly (Friday mornings) post a diary called What Are You Reading?

I’m gonna try it out, over here, as well.  Perhaps here, with the smaller more (ahem) select audience, and with diaries spending more time up on the lists, we can get into more in-depth discussion.  OTOH, perhaps it will work just like at daily Kos. OTOOH, maybe it will sink like a stone.

Use the comments to tell us what you are reading

If you like to trade books, there’s [Book Mooch www.bookmoch.com]

Pony Party, the Help Desk(s)

this vid purports to have been made in response to the ‘medieval help desk’ vid below…
poetry help desk…

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Myanmar troops kill 9 more protesters
Associated Press
24 minutes ago

YANGON, Myanmar – Soldiers with automatic rifles fired into crowds of anti-government demonstrators Thursday, killing at least nine people in the bloodiest day in more than a month of protests demanding an end to military rule.

Bloody sandals lay scattered on some streets as protesters fled shouting “Give us freedom, give us freedom!”

On the second day of a brutal crackdown, truckloads of troops in riot gear also raided Buddhist monasteries on the outskirts of Yangon, beating and arresting dozens of monks, witnesses and Western diplomats said. Japan protested the killing of a Japanese photographer.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

New “Religion” No. 1

 

 

 welcome

 

 

 

The Paramilitary Threat to American Democracy

In the last minutes of her life, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein was dropping off and picking up paperwork at the central customs office near al Khilani Square in Baghdad.  McClatchy reports that as she walked out of the customs building:

an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets. Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

She must have hated us for our freedoms . . . fortunately, Blackwater USA was on the job and pumped several bullets into her to teach her to have more respect for the greatest democracy on earth.

Four other people were also killed in this incident.  As we all know, a week later Blackwater security guards thugs killed 11 people and wounded 12 more in central Baghdad.  Video confirms that they were unprovoked when they opened fire on a car with three people and a baby in it, killing them all.  By the time they finished firing, 7 more innocent people were dead, one of them a mother with eight children. 

This is what Iraqi “democracy” looks like.  Unless we’re very fortunate, American “democracy” may look much the same way if there’s a catastrophic war with Iran or another 9/11 and Blackwater is deployed on American streets to provide “security”.

Midnight Cowboying – Why you will never see the Apollo tapes

After a few calls into NASA, I finally broke down and went there. See, we jokingly call NASA the family business because we built the rockets and even the shuttles for America, but mostly for ourselves. We always thought we would have the first India Tea Company trading charter with aliens, making us richer than our wildest dreams and returning our once grand coat of arms to international importance. We also built them because we knew things we were never allowed to mention. This ends today.

After a meeting in a smoke-filled back room, I was told where the tapes were and I could see them in exchange for my advance lifter technology. Since NASA had already patented that against my consent, I decided there was no harm done in supplying the fractal sequences that drove the lifters. I even went the extra mile and showed them why certain fractals worked more efficiently within the gravitational-harmonics field, mostly out of fear someone might get hurt.

As their R&D team giddily ran off with my forbidden tech, a silver-templed member of the crew led me to back a room. Not only did they have the missing 698 tapes, they had them on HD. The only rule was I could never remove the missing movies from this underground bunker. After ordering an absurd amount of popcorn and Dr. Pepper, the old man sealed me in the undisclosed location and I settled in for about 200 hours of never before seen film.

Old diary, new idea

Climate disintegration, Katrina, and the Military Commissions Act are all  thought of together in my view…

Newcomb: On the North American Indian tradition of liberty

SOURCE

Bush’s power grab, assisted by a Republican majority in Congress, has also threatened the Bill of Rights, which was intended to protect the civil liberties of the individual from abusive governmental actions and thereby prevent tyranny. With the recent passage of the Military Commissions Act that Bush signed into law on Oct. 17, he and Congress have even suspended the writ of habeas corpus that has been part of the English Common System since the Magna Carta of 1215 A.D.

The Paiute Way To Cheap Green Energy

Don’t hear much about Paiutes.  At least I don’t.  Then again my hearing isn’t so hot.  All I know about the Northern Paiutes or Snake Indians is that as warriors they were a match for the Apaches and lived large in high desert country where the Apaches might have starved.

I know a little bit about that because I was born in Adel, OR, named for somebody’s sweetheart or a cow.  Nobody knows which. Here is a picture of the whole damn  town. I suspect there were a lot more Paiutes living in Adel than later invaders.

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