Thursday, April 13, 2006

Thoughts on Tyranny From Smart Dead Guys

Here are few little thoughts to chew on this weekend as you slide into a quiet Easter/Passover weekend. Whomever your God, pray for us all. King Georgie the 2nd and his band of merry felons are hard at work planning their next move. They'll tell you lies and try to make you believe its for your own good. They'll blame it on bad people...people who look, or sound, or dress, or worship, or love, or smell, different from you or I. They'll push your fear button and then tell you its okay to be afraid, that they'll protect you. But they won't. They'll send your children to war to die in strange places. They'll fill their coffers by stealing from you. They'll bankrupt your children. They'll tear up the earth and leave no log, or mountaintop, or glacier untouched. They'll protect their own interests and those of their highborn friends and silence everyone else with threats. They'll eavesdrop on their own people. They'll hide evidence. They'll discredit the honest. They'll excuse the criminal. Worst of all, they'll label as unpatriotic anyone, ANYONE, who dares to disagree with them. They are driving this country and this world to the brink of disaster.

Enjoy your jellybeans.

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"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in th guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
--James Madison

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
--Plato

"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."
--Edmund Burke

"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini...This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."
—Herbert Hoover

Balls!


Laugh of the day is actually a few days old. Well shoot me, I've been busy. So anyway, everyone knows by now that Dick "Don't Want to Rip My Chest Stitches"Cheney tossed out the first ball at the National's home opener the other day to a loud chorus of bipartisan booing. Explains the rather sour look on his face in this picture doesn't it? Or was the bulletproof vest chafing against the spot where his heart used to be? Well turns out the guys over at that UnFair and Unbalanced Network went scrambling for the sound mixer like rapido. Subsequent tape airings of the Veep's lousy pitch hitting the dirt EXCLUDED the audio track. You just have to laugh, it's classic Republican whitewash. I guess that means it never happened right?

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Discriminating Christians Want to Know...


This from Gabriel Rotello on The Huffington Post:

"The ever-inventive Christian right has unveiled a new tactic in their hate campaign against lesbians and gays. In a brilliant piece of twisted logic, they're now filing lawsuits against universities and workplaces that protect gays from discrimination, claiming that anti-discrimination policies discriminate against their own Christian right to...er...discriminate. Got it? You may be appalled by their grim determination."

I am, but it doesn't surprise me. I think I'll ask the boys of the CT Gay Man's Chorus what they think when I visit their Bingo-rama extravaganza on Saturday night, hosted by Joan Crawford and her lovely daughter Christina.



Monday, April 10, 2006

What Did the President Know? Everything.



Murray Waas is one of those journalists conservatives love to hate because he actually checks his facts like his mentor Jack Anderson used to. "Ummmm...well....ya see...." Shut up cracker! Anyway, Murray has his own blog (http://whateveralready.blogspot.com) which is always informative. The early posts are pretty funny too.

So Mur (mind if I call you Mur) has been writing for the National Journal and recently published a piece called "Insulating Bush" that ties the whole Niger Uranium/Valerie Plame/Lewis Libby debacle together so well even Little Georgie B. could understand it. Or as Daithí Mac Lochlainn (that's David McLoughlin for you non-Irish speaking type folk) over at The Gaelic Starover (http://gaelicstarover.blogspot.com) calls him "The Bushling".

The way Mur puts the pieces together they actually appear to fit. And they actually appear to be causing a little -- shall we say discomfort -- in certain political circles. Why? Because at the center of the Uranium/Plame/Libby triangle is a little piece of paper: a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, a "President's Summary" written specifically for Bush in October 2002. That's three months before the infamous State of the Union address where Bush said the Iraqies were trying to buy aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons. The summary says, "that although 'most agencies judge' that the aluminum tubes were 'related to a uranium enrichment effort,' the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch 'believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons.'

So three months before the speech that cemented the US's reasons for going to war, Bush knew that the story being bandied about was a bunch of hooey. Big shock right? Not really -- everyone has known for years that Bush, Cheney & Co. lied through their teeth to get the war machine rolling.

So, according to the National Journal piece, prior to the 2004 election, Karl Rove starts getting antsy about this NIE summary being leaked. Why? Because Joe Wilson--a former ambassador who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to find out if the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium "Yellowcake" used for making nuke-ular bombs-- is rattling the cage and saying things like, "Uunh unh. No way-hay" and writing op-ed pieces for the New York Times about it. The Bush gang has already decided that Joe Tenant and the CIA will take the fall for "faulty" intelligence on Niger, but there's still that nagging issue of Wilson and his doubts about the tubes. This is starting to sound like "The Caine Mutiny". "Ah but the tubes...thats where I had them..."

Anyway, the plan was hatched to discredit Wilson and his position in Niger through his wife, Valerie Plame, the CIA operative who "was responsible" for his position. As we now know, Bush told Cheney, who told Rove, who told Libby, who told Novak, Miller, Cooper, Woodward...and so on, and so on, and so on to "out" Valerie Plame.

You can read the whole thing for yourself at http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm.

Its a helluva yarn. Can't wait to find out how it ends. Great job Mur. Keep up the good work.

All Hail the End of the World as We Know it


Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic but I had to work the word "hail" into the title. This picture was sent to me by my friend Deb who lives in Franklin, TN. They didn't have any tornadoes there but the pre-show looks like it was pretty exciting. One of these puppies conking you in the noggin has got to hurt.

Wrath of God? Wouldn't surprise me.