Ground Control to Major Tom . . .

Astronomers working on the analysis of data being acquired by NASA’s WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite announced that they found a huge void in the universe. The hole found in the constellation of Eridanus is about a billion light years across, which is roughly 10,000 times as large as our galaxy or 400 times the distance to Andromeda, the closest “large” galaxy.

I’m not a NASA scientist with a fancy Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, but I have an announcement to make anyway.  I hope NASA won’t be too annoyed at me for interrupting their distant stargazing, but I think they should know there’s a huge void in our universe much closer to home:

In fact there are two huge voids in our little corner of the universe. They’re located within blocks of each other and have been time-warping the entire planet back to the Middle Ages ever since the Big Bang of 2001.  This catastrophe has been casually referred to in the media as Bush v. Gore, which is no surprise to bloggers like us–the Big Bang of 2001 only tore the very fabric of the space-time continuum to shreds, so it wasn’t likely to be noticed or reported accurately by the corporate media.

These voids at each end of Pennsylvania Avenue have been coexisting in a dual alternate universe where facts are nonexistent, sentient thought is extinct, and the Witches Must Be Burned Act just passed 445-1 in the House and 99-1 in the Senate.  See that figure up on top of the Capitol Dome?  The Goddess of Liberty used to be up there, but they took her down.  The Slut of Incumbency is up there now, the inhabitants of her domain worship her above all else.  

BushCo has been Robbing the Cradle of Civilization for more than four years.  His government of the war criminals, by the war criminals, and for the war criminals has the blood of half a million Iraqi men, women, and children on its hands. They have been robbed of their very existence, and the land that was the first to experience the dawn of human civilization has been plunged into the darkness of barbarity.  

Iraq is known as the cradle of civilization, with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years.  It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and above all, developed the skill of writing.

Fourteen-thousand Friedman Units after human civilization emerged in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, a tribe of Neo-cons also managed to develop the skill of writing, and scribbled this.

The consequences have been horrific. The human suffering inflicted by that blasphemy of democracy they call Neoconservatism has horrified a world that once looked upon America with admiration and respect.  Iraq is not free, it was never meant to be.  Endless war is the Neo-con agenda, oil is their Holy Grail, and Iran is their next target. They wage their wars from TV studios, so they haven’t experienced the human suffering they are responsible for, they haven’t been subjected to the dehumanizing brutality of this war of conquest they have unleashed.  

But many others have.  Many others have walked down that dark road, and have paid the price.  The cost of that journey can be seen in their eyes, and in the eyes of everyone who still has a conscience and tears to shed for the innocent:  

Reality is fading across Washington D.C.

It’s fading like shadows into the night.  It’s fading by the hour and institutionalized madness is taking its place. Republicans are no longer the only ones peddling memorized lies for political advantage.  They are no longer the only ones actively subverting the Constitution for the sake of power.  They are no longer the only ones complicit in war crimes.  They are no longer the only ones who’ve gone off-the-charts bat shit insane and are damn proud of it.

In that psych ward of barking lunatics that used to be our government, Democrats and Republicans alike are portraying lethal irresponsibility as responsibility.  They expect us to believe that funding tens of billions of dollars again and again and again to prolong a pointless, endless occupation is responsible statesmanship.  They expect us to believe that legislating immunity for telecom criminals is responsible lawmaking.  They expect us to believe lie after lie as our soldiers die and their loved ones cry and NSA hacks spy for the Commander Guy.

Impeachment?  They won’t even try.  Don’t ask why.

Lost For Words . . .

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For understandable reasons, most of us can’t stand to watch a Republican for more than a minute or two.  I learned today that turning the channel quickly has been a big mistake, because it’s prevented us from formulating an effective counter-strategy to this rampage from hell BushCo has subjected us to for seven years. 

My enlightenment occurred because of a malfunctioning remote control channel button, which left me no choice but to watch a replay of Cheney’s American Legion speech on C-Span.  I couldn’t help but notice that after several minutes, his head started spinning around on his shoulders.

This rather revealing event occurred 11 minutes and 6 seconds into his speech.

If my math is correct, that’s 666 seconds . . . 

Who could have imagined that someone would hijack jetliners and fly them into buildings?

Who could have imagined that the New Orleans levees would fail?

Anyone with a functioning brain and basic reading skills, that’s who. 

Not long from now, in the aftermath of their latest failure to comprehend the mysteries of cause and effect in the reality-based world, we’ll probably be hearing the same BushCo shitheads proclaiming, “who could have imagined that The Most Dangerous Damn in the World would collapse?”

Are you determined to do something to end this nauseating clusterfuck in Washington D.C.?

Are you tired of Nancy Pelosi and her despicable pandering to a war criminal president?

Are you tired of being told to shut the fuck up so “responsible” Democrats in Congress can take turns apologizing to Mr. 24 Percent all the way to electoral annihilation in 2008? 

Are you seething that the Democratic leadership bullied Congressman Stark into apologizing by threatening to support a Republican censure vote against him?  Was it an ordeal to watch Madame Speaker cooperate with gutter crawling Republicans, who eagerly smear 7th graders but rise up in outraged indignation if someone tells the fucking truth about that psychopath in the White House? 

How did a nice girl from Arlington, Virginia become a notorious whore for war criminals?

Ask her.

But brace yourself for a pack of lies.

Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was featured on his album Storm Front, which was released in 1989.  Since then, the fire he wrote about has spread, many new fires have been ignited, and not very many have been put out.  So I’ve written updated lyrics and am posting this video of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for those who may not be familiar with the song. 

It was so gracious of Madame Speaker to take a few minutes out of her busy schedule whoring for war criminals to chat with Wolf Blitzer and Dana Milbank.  I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I learned a lot from these helpful interviews.  For example, I had no idea that Democrats curling into fetal positions every time The Decider appears at a podium is actually courageous defiance.  I had no idea that handing Bush $300 billion to keep getting American soldiers killed in Iraq is supporting the troops.

I had no idea this 60-vote barrier in the Senate was such a sacred bipartisan tradition.  Ever since this Beltway Race to Batshit Land started back in 2001, I thought it was a shameful trick only treasonous obstructionists would resort to. I had no idea that taking Impeachment off the table would unleash a juggernaut of accountability of such awesome power that Scooter Libby might lose his license to practice law. 

They call us bloggers.

But we are much more than that.  We are the conscience of the world.  We are the voice of the powerless.  We are the light in an age of darkness. 

The politicians and profiteers and pundits ignored us.  Then they laughed at us.  Now they’re fighting us.

So be it. 

We will not believe their lies.  We will not worship their generals.  We will not condone their war crimes.  We are a global movement for justice and peace.  Some of us live in North America, some of us live in Europe, some of us live in Asia, or Africa or South America.  But being born in different lands no longer isolates believers in justice and peace from one another. 

We’ve been on a long journey already and it’s far from over, but nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. 

We shall overcome.  Someday . . .

We shall live in peace.  Someday . . .

Until that day comes, we will not be silent, we will not be afraid, we will not give up, we will never stop seeking a better world. 

Across America last weekend, most people paid little if any attention to news about the brutal suppression of democracy advocacy in Myanmar by General Than Shwe and his regime.  They had places to go and people to see.  Football stadiums were filled to capacity by millions of fans eager to watch their team’s latest must-win game.  From New York to California, throngs of shoppers filled the malls to celebrate America’s greatness by handing some of their minimum wage dollars to minimum wage clerks in exchange for a shirt or blouse made by other minimum wage workers. That night, many of these football fans and shoppers went to a restaurant to hand a few more of their minimum wage dollars to a minimum wage waitress in exchange for a meal prepared by a minimum wage cook.

Prosperity from The Gipper’s tax cuts will trickle down any day now, so eat, drink, and be merry, America!  There’s some trouble going on in Burma?  Most of our fellow “citizens” shrugged that off.  Whatever.  Those foreigners are always killing each other over something or other. 

On Sunday morning, some of these football fans and shoppers went to a mega-church and handed some more of their minimum wage dollars to a wealthy evangelist in exchange for a rousing sermon about glorifying Jesus by getting rich.  Then, content that their Christianity would remain safely intact for another week, they settled in at home to watch more football or went shopping again. 

With all of these important activities to pursue, it’s no wonder that most Americans have paid little if any attention to the violent suppression of democracy in Myanmar. Too many of them can’t even summon the decency to give a shit about the suppression of democracy here, so why would they give a shit about democracy in some country they’d never even heard of before?  Besides, they probably told themselves as they fixed a snack that all that fuss those monks were raising before they got arrested and executed is over now and has no impact at all on them or their family.

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”.