The Aristocrats.

If you are unfamiliar with the Dirtiest Joke in the World, here’s a little primer.

It’s a gorgeous day here in my city and I’m going to pack up my laptop and find a lovely place to eat. So in lieu of a Sunday sermon, here’s my version:

The Republican Party walks into the American People’s living rooms, and says, "We're the Family Value’s Party, and we'd like to represent you."

The American People say, "Sorry, but we’re a little leery of Family Values parties. They tend to be scams run by demagogues.”

Republican Party says, "But this is really special."

The American People says, "Okay, well what's the act?"

The Republican Party replies, "Well after the worst attack on American soil in history, we hijack the nation's grief and rage to plunge us into a war with entirely the wrong country.

“Then we let the actual terrorist responsible for the attack to sit in a comfy chair on the edge of the stage and laugh and laugh and laugh for the duration of the performance.

“The Mainstream Press then comes out, bends over and we take them violently and repeatedly from behind by jamming giant lies up their poop chutes, which come spurting out of their mouths the next day as 'authoritative reporting'. Then we cite our own regurgitated lies as independent ‘proof’ that we're right.

“Meanwhile Fox News and Hate Radio will peel the flesh from the fallen soldiers (whose flag-draped coffins are to be kept strictly hidden during the entire act. Out of, y’know, respect), wrap themselves in their skin, the Flag and the Bible and spend the rest of the act as a kind of Rich White Greek Chorus, screaming that anyone who is not in the act is a traitor.

“They will also hypnotically repeat ‘9/11/Iraq/Saddam Hussein/Osama bin Laden’ over and over and over again until any distinctions between them become magically invisible.

“We then wheel a brain-dead body on the stage named Terri Schiavo, and proceed to use it to defile both the institution of marriage and the sanctity of life…in the name of the Jesus. And then the President himself will interrupt one of his many vacations to make a special guest appearance and sign a special law to do this.

“Our ‘maverick’ candidates then come out, set fire to their remaining principles, and slither though their own shit to kiss Jerry Falwell’s pasty, pestilent ass.

“Then a kick-line of severely wounded veterans of our illegal war hobble across the stage, are locked into tiny rooms crawling with rats and roaches, and are left to sit in their own waste.

“The stage will be ringed by White Male Conservative Fundamentalist Evangelical on tall pulpits who will repetitively rant about the feminists, queers, Darwin and the ACLU oppressing and destroying Christian America while urinating continuously on the proceedings. To spice it up a little, every now and then one of the White Male Conservative Fundamentalist Evangelical preachers will smoke meth and/or orally pleasure some young gentleman volunteer from the audience.

“The daughter of the Vice President will stand under the shower of Conservative urine and sing a merry song about her great love of the Family Values of her Father and her Party.

”Then – live and on stage -- she and her lesbian lover will then give birth to a child out of wedlock.

“Every six minutes a voice will shout from offstage ‘Who is to blame for this horror show?’ and everyone on stage will shout back ‘Slick Willie!’ in unison.

“Every four minutes a spotlight will pick out various Family Values leaders in the wings engaged in a variety of crimes and/or sexual acts including but not limited to sex with a gay prostitute, sex as a gay prostitute, attempting to solicit gay sex from young boys, embezzling funds from disabled veterans, stealing from native Americans, looting and then busting out various massive corporations, rigging elections, selling soldiers tainted food and toilet water at premium prices, attacking senior citizens for hating soldiers and loving “teh gay”

(Or did you forget?)

“And so forth…”

The American People look very uncomfortable, but the Republican Party continues…

“This will be followed by a series of what we call Ironic Soliloquies.

“First, one of our Faith Based 'scientists' will sodomize a baby polar bear with the worlds 'Global Warming' painted on its fur.

“Second, the head of the agency in charge of responding to national emergencies will let an entire American city die. No expense will be spared in making this as realistic as possible, including the mocking of the dead, the dying and the devastated as being 'lazy and stupid'...

“Third, the top Law Enforcement Officer in the country will torture a series of bound prisoners live, soak the writ of Habeas Corpus in kerosene and set in alight, smash the machinery of democracy, all while singing a rockin’ cover of 'I Don’t Remember'.



“The Secretary of Defense will then fuck an entire country into the ground, destroy the military, lie until his ass actually falls off, and mock anyone who asks honest questions.

“Then, for laughs, the Vice President will shoot a guy. An old guy. In the face.

“The old guy will then profusely apologize for getting in the way of the Vice President’s buckshot.”

The Republican Party pauses, smiling, and then continues:

"This is the best part: the President of the United States then comes back onstage in a flight suit and a massive codpiece, struts over the dead and wounded, over our ruined national reputation, over our failing schools, over our crippling debt, and praises every one of us for the brilliant job we have done, and passes out Presidential Medal’s of Freedom.

“Then a giant banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’ drops out the ceiling, and 29% of the audience applauds wildly as we all get up and take a bow."

The Republican Party looks at the American People and says, "Well, that's the act. What do you think?"

The American People just sit there stunned for a long time. Finally they say, "That's a hell of an act. What do you call yourselves?"

"The Aristocrats!"

The Great Iraqi Reconstruction Bust Out

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Brought to youse by dees guys (yeah, the pic is dated but still revoltingly accurate).

Over a year ago, this was the story of the Iraqi Reconstruction effort (now interred behind the Time’s Select Shield Wall, but here are excerpts from the post I did at the time):

First, this from the NYT detailing how this Administration has fucked up the Iraqi Rebuilding Program to the tune of $25 billion dollars (a figure which, in and of itself, is 25 times higher than Paul Wolfowitz told us would be the price tag for the entire war.)

January 24, 2006
Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office.

…

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

"It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."

One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J. Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program.

"It's gutsy and it's honest," said Mr. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy group based in Washington. He was not the source of the leaked document. Even in the early stages of writing the draft, Mr. Hamre said, one central message on the reconstruction program was already fairly clear, that "it didn't go particularly well."

…

It "almost" looks like a spoils system?

Jeez. No, this is nothing less that the after-action report of the sacking of the Iraqi Rebuilding fund. This is a snapshot of what happens when looting is Job One.
…

And now this. Today. By the same reporter.

April 29, 2007
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling

By JAMES GLANZ

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

…
Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.

...
The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Mr. Bowen said.

...
The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled; and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

...

So what do we know for sure?

1. The predicate for this war has been, from the start, a tissue of premeditated lies perpetrated on the public by George W. Bush.

2. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are now dead behind the war George W. Bush lied us into, and about which he has been lying for four years, declaring over and over again that we are “turning the corner” and “making good progress” when the facts on the ground proved otherwise over and over again.

3. The tens of billions of dollars that have been confiscated from the American taxpayer to rebuild the country the George W. Bush cavalierly destroyed has mostly been pissed away. Missing and presumed looted by Administration cronies and co-conspirators.

4. And of the very few reconstruction projects that actually got done and certified as successes? It turns out that was all bullshit too.

5. This treasonable behavior was carried out by the leaders of the Party that relentlessly investigated Bill Clinton for bad land deals and Christmas Car lists, and then impeached him for getting a blowjob and trying to weasel out of admitting it.

The logistical and fiscal excuses this Administration and their co-conspirators float every time they get caught lying to the public and picking our pockets while cowering behind our soldiers can get tangly and headache-inducing, so here’s a little video that explains it all really well:



The men who the GOP has put in charge of our country are criminals.

Yes, the scope and scale at which they steal and kill is so vast as to be dizzying, but at the end of the day these are nothing but gangsters, pure and simple. And the simpletons and brownshirts who continue to stand with them are nothing more that their wheel-men, and must be called out as such at every opportunity.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:

In the Age of Duyba, you can either be a good American, or a good Republican, but you can no longer be both.

Is it Meme-nto?

That inability to form any new political memories after 1997?

Or is it something darker?

I was at play in the offerings of the Mouse Circus this Sunday, as is my habit, and there was something just plain “off” and deeply weariness-inducing about the whole morning, which is why I opted not to write about it.

Throughout the intertoobs people were a-giggle at the fact that Wan Williams (h/t watertiger) actually stood up on his hind legs and yipped a little truth at his masters. And on the flip side of the coin, there was a background whirr of outrage at the way Newt Gingrich was handled on “This Week…”

Here is the snip:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the broader context? After Columbine, you gave a speech where you blamed 35 - blamed the shootings on 35 years of liberalism.
You went - you said, "I want to say to the elite of this country, the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite - I accuse you in Littleton of being afraid to talk about the mess you've made and being afraid to take responsibility for the things you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don't have the courage to look at the world you have created."

Do you stand by that prescription today?

GINGRICH: Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you're committing an act of evil.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism?

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women - the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don't have any discussion about what's happened to our culture because while we're restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it's impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech.

And I would argue that that's a major component of what's happened to our culture in the last 40 years.
…

And that was it.

In a more just and beautiful alternate Universe somewhere, that would have been followed by Stephanopoulos pausing (David Caruso-like)


dramatically removing his eyewear (David Caruso-like),


and then verbally whipping the living shit out of The Newt.

In an alternate Universe, where the MSM had not been completely hollowed out and filled with sycophants, Marshall Petains and access-twitchy power-whores, Stephanopoulos might have followed up with something like:

As a serial adulterer, liar and racist who dumped his wife for a newer model while she was on her cancer bed, remind me again of what exactly make you fit to act as anyone's scold or moral arbiter?

Or…

As one of the giants in deploying hatespeech for political gain…

Or…

Do you think part of the reason your Party lost the midterms was having unhinged, fascist douchebags who feed on tragedy like gangrene feeds on an untreated chest wound like you as one of their leading spokesmen?

Or…

Really? Because for six years we’ve had a Republican a foreign policy based pretty much completely on ranting, incoherent, hate-laced, “Kill ‘em all!” xenophobia, brutally realized by bringing overwhelming firepower to bear on people who had done us absolutely no harm in a country that was absolutely no threat to us.

So honestly I’d have figured you would have been vest-button-poppin’ proud that the Virginian Tech murderer had modeled the foreign policy half of the GOP hymnal as flawlessly as Tim McVeigh enacted your “Annihilate the Government!” domestic half?

But Lil' George didn’t.

He just sat there.

Knowing the Gingrich was coming on. Knowing this was the topic. Knowing that, being a despicable Right wing shitwhistle, his answer was likely going to be doubling-down -- louder and crazier -- on his previous despicable statements...Lil' George just sat there. Dangling off of Gingrich’s screed as silent and stinky and conspicuous as a turd on a hairy dog’s ass.

Why?

Whywhywhywhy???

Why such profuse cowardice in the face of such soul-shriveling evil?

I have long entertained the fantasy of taking down the deans and duchesses of the MSM with a trank gun and rendering them off to my own, private “Come To Jesus” camp in the wilds of Hintervania. There they would be shocked, shivered and dosed to their hairplugs with scopolamine until someone explained to me why the entire fucking media has lost its fucking mind.

Why has the Fourth Estate – right before our eyes -- become a bunch of cowardly Fifth Columnists?

Why, when confronted with clear and overwhelming proof of their complicity and gutlessness -- when asked the simple question “Why?” -- do they go all squirmy and twitchy and outraged?

Why do Conservatives get to stand on desks with their hair on fire and shriek the most ludicrous, vile and mendacious hogwhiz – year after year after year after year after motherfucking year -- unchallenged? Why do these same howler monkeys -– who have been not just wrong but spectacularly, catastrophically wrong about everything, every time -- keep getting invited back in front of the cameras and onto the pages of major newspapers?

And when they rise from their crypts yet again to spackle yet another layer of Conservative lies on the wounded world – to send another wave of our kids off to die for no good reason, circle the wagons around another corporate monster, piss another precious pint of what’s left of our nation’s good name down the sewer, tax-cut-and-spend us further into debt – why do the same “journalists” who were ever eager to carve another slice out of Clinton’s ass over trivia, now piss themselves in like puppies in a thunderstorm and hide under the bed as Conservatives rape the truth two feet in front of them and them rub their noses in it?

Why is it that if Dick Cheney were caught sodomizing an underage manatee in the triforium of the National Cathedral, the first three words out of any MSM haircut’s mouth would be, “But the Democrats…”?

And then, over the course of this week, first catching the last little bit of “The Smartest Guys in the Room” , and then watching Bill Moyer’s wonderful, expletive-evoking and long-overdue takedown of the press -- "Buying the War" -- on PBS, I was sadly reminded yet again what the Big Story really is.

When you widen the lens all the way out, what the history books will note as a the most important factor in the barbarization of early-21st Century America was the complete collapse of a free press. The slow motion defenestration of the heirs of Royko and Mencken. The bodysnatching of the children of Murrow; replaced with alien, oligarchy-friendly pods like Hume and Broder.

Which would actually make one helluva story!

As would reportage that in broad daylight here in the Land of the Free, an inept human scuff-mark named George W. Bush has managed to arrogate to himself unprecedented and virtually Imperial powers. Has worked every day of his Presidency and spilled the blood and treasure of others to unravel the fabric of American Democracy that so many of his betters spent their own blood and treasure to secure. That he has built a regime that Washington or Lincoln or either Roosevelt would have taken up arms to depose.

As would some ink spilled covering the ugly fact that millions of our fellow citizens actually despise democracy. Actually cheered on this two-bit Attila at every fascist step of the way.

As would the even uglier fact that, knowing now exactly what kind of monster the Crawford Dauphin really is, so many millions of our fellow citizens still cheer for this butt-end of the mental loaf.

As would some mention that one of America’s two major political parties has been completely take over, hollowed out and used as a battering ram to cripple our democracy and loot our treasury by a coalition of the dregs of American society.

But of course there are no such stories, because there is no longer a free, well-funded and unfettered press to investigate and report on them

The histories will show that while the Lords and Ladies of the MSM were fielding rock star salaries for regurgitation GOP talking points, they were simultaneously crying poormouth (we can't afford to keep armies of reporters on staff), and Americans who actual care about their country were reduced to cruising Comedy Central and Waiting for Olbermann for genuinely clear and insightful reporting.

Like Egyptian slaves, are we: gleaning the fields for stubble by night.

Which, above and beyond all other considerations, is sad. Heartbreakingly, tragically sad.

Because there are good, meaty conversations to be had on the vital issues of the day, but they cannot be had -- we cannot get on with the important business of healing and governing a great nation -- as long as the GOP exists in its current incarnation and as long as the national press is not held to public account and ridicule for its deliberate complicity in the poisoning of the well of civic discourse and the evisceration of Democracy in the country.

Now wingnuts will always have the easier burden because they always reflexively argue for water running downhill. As long as it does not affect them directly and personally, Conservatives will always let the sick rot, because they themselves are well-insured or are not sick. They will let poor people die, because poor people are lazy. Let NOLA drown and chuckle. Let the bestial and the insane arm themselves to the teeth. Let the Preznit keep throwing blood and treasure down his Iraqi rat hole…as long as their taxes are never touched and their children are never pressed into service.

But while regimes built on the fundamentalist’s fanaticism, the authoritarian’s infantile need for Infallible Daddy and an army of stoopids and bigots certainly have their own kind of jackbooted, lockstepping power, they are also terribly vulnerable. Terribly brittle.

Terribly...arteriosclerotic.

This Neocon regime is not vital and never has been. It has no flexibility, because as the manifestation of the perverse will of the demagogue, it has no capacity whatsoever for adaptation or self-correction, because demagogic Rule Number One is that the Dear Leader cannot be wrong.

Notice that even the most verbal GOP critics of the Gonzalez sinkhole feel the yank of their White House leash.

They -- liked the press that conspires with them -- speak out feebly or not at all on the ongoing scandals of NOLA…and Iraq…and Abu Ghraib…and torture as policy…and secret prisons…and purloined elections…and habeas corpus being walled up and left to die like Fortunato.

And the many treasons of Karl Rove.

And the destruction of the CIA’s WMD intel infrastructure out of Cheney pique.

And their base’s Rapture-based molestation of genuine Christian values.

Their antediluvian superstitions that supercede any notion of science.

And the many treasons of Karl Rove.

Their pathological need to lie – badly -- about every single fucking thing.

And millions of missing emails.

And the many, many treasons of Karl Rove.

And so many more, all notable for the fact that no one in the MSM and no on in the Republican party dares to even whisper their simple common element: That they are all the fault of George W. Bush.

That their Dear Leader and his Regent are lying, criminal freaks who have led them all to disaster after disaster.

These GOP regime-dead-enders are weak and stupid and rotten to the bone. One or two hard, righteous punches and they would go down like a sack of wet switchgrass.

One or two of the kind of punches that the MSM used to casually rain on Bill Clinton day after day after day...

And yet the MSM continues to prop up the rotting carcass of the GOP like the corpse in ”Weekend at Bernie's”, and waltz it lovingly across the national stage year after year after year, protecting it as ferociously as they would their own children even as it goes raving mad, putrefies and crumbles to reek and maggots in their arms.

Is it that meme-nto disease? That inability to form any new political memories after 1997? Or is it something darker?

Whatever the reason, the story behind it would certainly be gripping, epic, infuriating and a great and lasting service to the cause of Democracy.

Too bad we no longer have a press capable of telling it.

Tenet “Shocked! Shocked!“

to find dishonorable behavior going on in the Bush White House!

Dubya and Tenet, pictured here in happier days.

Now, not so much.

Tenet Says He Was Made a Scapegoat Over Iraq War
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2007; A15

Former CIA director George J. Tenet bitterly complains in a forthcoming television interview that White House officials set him up as a scapegoat when they revealed that he had assured President Bush the intelligence on Iraq's suspected weapons arsenal was a "slam dunk."

Tenet, who was one of the longest-serving CIA directors in U.S. history, resigned abruptly in June 2004 after administration infighting over the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom six months later. Tenet then remained publicly silent about his role in the presentation of prewar intelligence that turned out to be wrong. But in a memoir scheduled for release on Monday, Tenet will offer his version of events and of conversations preceding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Tenet received a reported $4 million advance for the book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," which is being published by HarperCollins. Yesterday, CBS News's "60 Minutes" released excerpts of its Tenet interview, which will air Sunday night.

In the interview, Tenet acknowledged that he used the phrase "slam dunk" during a conversation with Bush and other key advisers in December 2002. But Tenet said the phrase was an offhand remark used to describe the ease with which a public case for war could be made. "We can put a better case together for a public case," Tenet told "60 Minutes." "That's what I meant."

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward first wrote about the conversation between Tenet and Bush in his 2004 book "Plan of Attack," chronicling the run-up to the invasion. Bush told Woodward then that Tenet's "slam dunk" assurance had been "very important" as he weighed decisions about the invasion.

In the television interview, Tenet takes special exception with Bush's comments, telling "60 Minutes" that he will "never believe that what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never!" White House planning for the invasion had been far along by then, Tenet said, with military and logistical plans near completion.

Tenet said that the description offered first to Woodward and then repeated by senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was "the most despicable thing that ever happened to me."
"You don't do this," Tenet said. "You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me."
…

So let me get this straight.

You led the most powerful spy agency on Earth, right? And yet the fact that the people who purloined the 2000 election, gutted John McCain for sport and came to power with an entire, pre-cooked, PNAC/fascist vision for America were a vicious, backstabbing, dishonorable pack of jackals somehow eluded you?

I mean, who in the fuck did you think you were working for, Mr. Tenet?

Facts and conclusions about the nature and character of the Bushies which were gleanable by millions everyday citizens with no vast intelligence networks available to them -- who were simply paying attention to the neutered mess that passes for news these day -- somehow sailed right on past the head of the CIA?

We’re not exactly Mycroft Holmes, are we Mr. Tenet?

Or Mike Hammer.

Or Jeff Lebowski.

Or even Maxwell Smart.

But then again I'll bet none of them have a spiffy Presidential Medal of Freedom hanging in their rumpus room next to their 30 pieces of silver.

Spare the rod

Spoil the child.

Compare and contrast this Huckabee


and his recipe for dealing with percieved threats:

Huckabee says concealed handgun might have stopped Virginia Tech massacre
By Associated Press
Saturday, April 21, 2007 - Updated: 05:37 PM EST

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said a concealed handgun carried by a faculty member or student at Virginia Tech might have reduced the toll from Monday’s shooting spree by a student.

"If somebody had been able to stop the shooter before he was able to kill that many people, there may not have been that many," the former Arkansas governor said Thursday in an interview with radio station KUAR at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in response to a question about carrying concealed weapons.

A longtime hunter, Huckabee has spoken publicly before about his support for concealed-weapon permits _ and his own license to carry.

Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 people Monday on the Virginia Tech campus before taking his own life.
...

With this Huckabee

and his funny little story

Huckabee's son arrested with handgun

By ANDREW DeMILLO, Associated Press Writer 44 minutes ago

David Huckabee, a son of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, was arrested at an Arkansas airport Thursday after a federal X-ray technician detected a loaded Glock pistol in his carry-on luggage.

"I removed the bag and asked Mr. Huckabee if he knew what he had in the bag," Little Rock police officer Arthur Nugent wrote in a report after being summoned to a security checkpoint. "He replied he did now."

Huckabee, 26, later pleaded guilty in Little Rock District Court after being charged with a misdemeanor count of possessing a weapon in a prohibited place.

"It was a silly mistake," Huckabee told reporters as he left the Pulaski County Jail. When asked whether it would affect his father's presidential campaign, Huckabee responded, "It shouldn't."

District Judge Lee Munson gave Huckabee a one-year suspended jail sentence and ordered him into 10 days of community service — which Huckabee can avoid by paying $100. Huckabee will be on probation for a year. Fines and costs totaled $855.

The son of the former Arkansas governor held a concealed weapons permit at the time of the incident but state police are taking steps to revoke it. The elder Huckabee, who said last week that Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho perhaps could have been stopped if a teacher or student had also been armed, also has a concealed weapons permit.

...

I for one am long through letting wingnuts off the hook for the stupid, reckless and utterly irresponsible things they do and say.

Long through with extending a compassionate heart to member of a Party that believes only in slash and slander politics. That nurture and harvest hate and fear as means to electoral ends.

If you want a little understanding for the fuck ups you and your idiot kid make, then you can fucking well store up some treasure in that account by extending a little understanding to your fellow man, but I am all done giving the benefit of the doubt to any member of the Party that has risen to power by beating up the poor, throatpunching the weak, mocking the outsider and calling people like me unAmerican.

Fuck you, Huckabee.

Trying to carry a loaded weapon onto an aircraft should presumptively be considered a credible threat of aggression.

Armed aggression.

And in a post-9/11 world? Are you kidding me? You do remember 9/11, don’t you Mike, or can you Republicans only manage to recall the 11th of September when you need to slander Democrats?

And by your own lights justice and public safety demands that such a threat of violence be met by the swift and massive preemptive firepower of a heavily armed mob of Quickdraw McCitizens.

Sorry, Mike, but in the Concealed Carry America of your dreams your kid would've been shot to bits under a righteous hail of preemptive Second Amendment lead.

As dead as Amadu Dialo.

Your rules, Mike

Your rules, not mine.

A New World

Holy Crap!

Anyone who would have posited this even half-seriously just a few hundred years ago would have been witch-stake bait.

Hell, in memory yet green it was once the height of haughty lumpen wisdom to look down one’s nose at rocket club dorks who suggested that men would one day walk on the Moon.

And now?

We have a potentially habitable fucking planet found outside our little neighborhood, and yet this news is not incised in 146-point Times New Roman font on the front page of every paper on Earth.

Sure it’s not exactly a weekend buggy ride from here, but it’s not even the lead story anywhere but YahooNews. Which is kinda sad, but also kinda cool I suppose, because like cell phones or laptops or a dozen other revolutions that have rocketed from startling and “gee whiz”, to ubiquitous and “yeah, so?” right before our eyes, maybe (with the exception of the Christopath army of darkness) the age and size and complexity of the Universe have become an accepted thing.

Big Bang? Evolution? C’mon Herbert, get with it. I mean all the kids are doing it.

Here’s the tale.

Potentially habitable planet found
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 7 minutes ago
For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water.

However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.
Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.
…

So is it "The Gold at the Starbow's End"?

· Synopsis: The purpose of an eight-man mission to the Alpha Centauri system may not be to find the Alpha-Aleph planet after all.

· Review: Very good story with a few surprises and some cool exposition. The astronauts, four couples sent with the purpose of populating the planet, bide their huge amounts of free time with learning the intricacies of science to a point that surpasses common human knowledge. Meanwhile, the scientist who organized the trip is grilled over the true purpose of the mission. The narrative remains engrossing as it swaps between reports from the spaceship and the latest happenings in Washington.

Or "JEM"?

Sometime in the near future, the twin forces of overpopulation and environmental depletion have led the nations of the world to form three major economic blocs, each named after the resources they still possess in enough abundance to supply the rest of the world.

Kept at peace by runaway nuclear proliferation, which has given even some of the smaller nations the bomb, the Food Bloc (which feeds the world), the Energy Bloc (which still produces fossil fuels) and the People Bloc (which exports cheap labor) all exist in an uneasy truce, fueled by their mutual economic need. But the resentments simmering beneath the surface are so strong that the stalemate cannot exist for long.

Possible hope arrives when astronomers discover a habitable planet circling a distant sun.
…

Escapism my ass.

Anyone tells you that science fiction is escapist, you tell them to jam an allotropic iron torpedo up their bikini area and then turn off its inertialess drive.

Incoming!

This from the Dallas News.

Southlake school evacuated after student brings grenade

05:01 PM CDT on Tuesday, April 24, 2007

By LAURIE FOX / The Dallas Morning News
lfox@dallasnews.com

SOUTHLAKE – Old Union Elementary School was evacuated for 90 minutes Tuesday morning after a fourth-grader brought an inactive grenade to school.

Carroll ISD spokeswoman Julie Thannum said more than 500 students were evacuated to nearby Southlake Baptist Church Elementary School as a precaution.

She said the student brought the grenade, which still had the pin still in it, for show and tell. A family friend brought the device back from Iraq.

The local bomb squad removed the device from the campus. Students returned to the building at about 9:30 a.m.

District officials said they would use the incident, which prompted calls from media nationwide, to reiterate to students and parents what items are acceptable to bring to school.

Officials also said the incident illustrated that the school district's safety procedures can be effectively executed.

“We had a plan, and it worked very quickly,” Ms. Thannum said.

Some parents signed their children out of school for the day but returned them to campus later in the morning, officials said

WTF kind of crisis reaction is that?

I mean seriously? Developing a rational plan in advance? And then executed same with an orderly evacuation followed immediately with a phalanx of trained law enforcement specialists?

What the Hell?

Hasn’t the Reich Wing taught us in the last week that the only response to any and every campus threat is a massive counterstrike by anyone who happens to be standing around?

Because aren’t people at their absolute peak when they are armed, freaked, and weapons are going off around them? I mean, isn’t that the scenario that every cop just dreams of walking in on? That every platoon leader dreams of finding himself in the middle of?

Too bad there wasn't a squad of heavily armed locals laying in wait in the classroom, ready to panther-spring into battle.

Or a Geraldo, who is world famous for his ability to calm troubled waters

and take swift, decisive action to bring a violent situation under control.

Or at least a Michael Weiner Savage available to lay down his sweet ninja moves.

No matter the threat, the context or the realities of human nature. we now know that the answer to all problems is More Guns.

So sure, this little Texas Grenadier skated thanks to rampant liberalthink, but one can dream...


...one can dream.

Irritating Ideas

From an alien land.

This from HuffPo caught me wrong.

Release 0.9: Open ToDo Lists
READ MORE: Esther Dyson

[the final Simonyi tour post is coming very soon now; it's in fact-check currently.]

Dina Kaplan of blip.tv, Astro Teller of BodyMedia, John Hagel formerly of McKinsey, Matt Cohler of Facebook, Steve Starr from Revver and I were sitting around at Dialog yesterday and Dina came up with the notion of open to-do lists.

It's so hard to set priorities.... why not let the people who want things from you have a voice, too? Instead of moaning and sighing and telling people "Oh I'm so busy" - which often comes off as "Oh I'm so important" - why not post your to-do list and let people see for themselves...

The idea is not exactly to make a market or auction for your time - because money is not (or shouldn't be) the point. And what else could people bid for your time with? Perhaps a closed social network in which everyone is allocated timepoints to bid for others' time? What exchange rate would operate between, say, Sergey Brin and some young entrepreneur eager for his attention? Or between Tom Friedman and his many fans? [Shades of the attention economy here.]

Instead, the notion is to provide transparency so that people can (ideally) calibrate for themselves whether you will be interested/have time for their request. Of course, it wouldn't really work: People at either end of the spectrum are likely to miscalculate. The clueless will think their request is important no matter what else you have to do, and the people you really want to go out of the way for, may be too humble in their demands.

But it's an interesting thought experiment.... Thanks, Dina!

It sure sounds like fun to be in one of the upper berths of the economy. To dwell in an ecosystem where claims on one's time can perhaps be dealt with entrepreneurially; in ways that involve bidding, load balancing and the rational allocation of resources.

Thing is, I don't know of a single human operating in the labor market whose work-life functions in any way that even remotely resembles that world. Mind you I am not even arguing the efficacy of the proposition; rather, I am amused by the notion of the existence of such a rarified, moneyed, cultural orangery in which such an idea would even occur to someone as meriting serious consideration.

I am equally amused by the suggestion that it would fail due to “miscalculation[s]” on the part of the clueless and the humble.

Such are the musings of the…lolling class. Our American Eloi who ruminate on whether or not the garden in the south lawn would look better in pastels this year, or dressed in more vivid, primary colors.

I have nothing against such people; I do not begrudge them their good fortunes. But listening to them opine on the subject of the division of labor - on work, essentially -- reminds me of the parable of the two horses. One horse was clean of limb and eye, straight-backed and used to a life of frisking around the paddock, taking the children of the manor on little rides, and eating sugar and sweet grasses. The other horse's back was bent from years of hauling too-heavy sacks of grain. Its legs were splayed and its breath came in short pants.

The two came upon each other - one gamboling and one slogging under the weight of a load of oats - and the unencumbered horse recoiled in horror.

“How can you stand upright under such a murderous burden?” he asked.

“What burden?” came the answer.

In the world of work the classes so completely talk past each other's experiences and day-to-day realities that I thought I would take the opportunity afforded by Ms. Dyson's frivolous article to ask a different question.

Thing is, after a fashion I do share my “To Do” list with peers and friends and even my employer(s). Their responses run the Aristotle’s dramaturgical gamut from pity (“Holy shit. I had no idea.”) to terror (“Tell me, oh Ghost of Employment Yet to Come, are these the shadows of jobs that Will be, or are they shadows of what May be, only?”)

My employer(s) as a rule haven't given a shit.

The origins of this are lost in the mists of time, but I clearly remember the dawning of the Third Age of Fucking over Employees.

T'was in the Spring, in 1993 it was, and this book – “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution” – was greeted by CEOs slavering to lay into their employees with threshers like the fall of Paris was greeted by the Nazis.

By 1995, James Champy had written another book - “Reengineering Management: Mandate for New Leadership” - which, among other things, was a carefully couched apologia for his first book, but the damage was done. Corporations had eagerly taken the book as a kind of a corporate indulgence; a permission slip that let them be butchers without any twinge of regret.

This from The Improvement Encyclopedia puts is pretty well:

In the early 90's Michael Hammer sparked one of the business/quality fads with a Harvard Business Review article entitled 'Don't Automate, Obliterate', in which he argued that continuous improvement and the use of technology in business processes was insufficient in a climate of rapidly increasing competition. In Hammer and Champy's follow-up book, they defined reengineering as:

"The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measure of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed."

Reengineering, then, means throwing away previous concepts and starting again. At its best, it is creative and impressive, adding significant new value to the company. At its worst, it is an excuse for firing people (and it has been used for this). In many cases, what was called reengineering was (and still is), in reality, just restructuring or downsizing.

Like all fads, it was implemented poorly and had a failure rate of around 70% to 80% (spot the Pareto Principle!). The problem lay both with the inadequate understanding of companies (and consultants!), and also with Hammer and Champy's insufficient attention to the people side of things.
...

Reengineering gave a meat-axe to management morons, and moved the “other duties as required” paragraph of one's employment agreement out from from boilerplate bog of the last page and into new and merciless prominence.

Suddenly there were absolutely no upper limits on what your employer could demand of you. Suddenly, under the banner of “The Reengineering Revolution” you could show up to the job one day and find that the workforce had been mass-purged of the disloyal, the most senior, inconvenient nooners who had exceeded their shelf-lives and the pricey. S

Difficult issues of race and gender and age discrimination could be “solved” in bulk by simply “reinventing” people's jobs to require of them credentials they did not possess. And, poof, like magic they were gone.

Suddenly every office was “Glengarry Glen Ross”.


Consider that on a weekly basis I am given more work than I can possibly reasonably manage. By several different people. Each insist that their projects are The Projects and all insisting that the mutually contradictory Prime Directives I am being given aren’t their problem.

Tiny dump trucks just pull up and drop it on my desk.

Over time I have tried many variants of the time-point scheme Ms. Dyson suggests, even going so far as printing up time-vouchers, suggesting that people "let the market decide" which priorities were the most important with a 20% set-aside for emergencies.

Didn't work.

I have worked out calendars tracking the predictable cyclical ups and downs inherent in the business. Shown how, instead of insisting that every waking hour that employees are not sweating blood is wasted time, downtime can be used to “sharpen the axe" and be better prepared for actual surges and high tides.

Didn't work.

In my time I have been hired to bring just such temporal discipline to bear on out-of-control organizations. To stand between the drunks and the liquor cabinet, so to speak.

Didn't work.

Doesn't work.

And so long as the “drunk” can fire you and hire three yes-men the minute they're tired of playing, ain't ever gonna work.

Because what is “reasonable” is no longer defined or negotiated reasonably.

Because as any working person with a pair of eyes and a brain quickly figures out, whim and panic and a quest for bureaucratic glory almost always far outweigh reason and strategic thinking when it comes to setting and re-setting organizational priorities.

Ask any secretary who has had to serve two bosses. Ask any project manager who has had to orchestrate multiple initiatives for different cost centers. Ask any not-for-profit that has tried to work under multiple grants.

The idea of a hierarchy which rises smoothly to a coordinated decision caste inside of which conflicting priorities can be harmonized is long dead, and buried alongside it is the corpse of the last middle manager who was able to say “No, my team has too much on its plate already” to the suits and make it stick.

Instead we now live deep within the age of

Evilene the CEO.

The one who sings:

“…
When you’re talkin’ to me
Don’t be cryin’ the blues
‘Cause don’t nobody bring me no bad news.
You can verbalize and vocalize
But just bring me the clues
But don’t nobody bring me no bad news.
…

The Boss does not want to hear no bad news. The Boss wants to hear his or her decisions are genius. And that they will be carried out at relativistic speeds.

This is what now passes for “visionary”.

And beneath the Boss – like baby birds waiting for their happy meals – we have the Executive Caste. Antennae cranked way, waaaay out and attuned to the Boss’ every chirp and twitter.

Whatever the request – a new global strategy, going fully wireless, or moving the home office three feet to the left -- the Executive Caste promises very lavishly. They are always getting right on it, and the Boss is always Steven Fracking Hawkings.

I’ve sat in meetings where manager after manager promised to deliver on some Giant Throbbing Imperative, never bothering to mention to the boss that their piece of the “work” would come to nothing more than passing the actual labor off to me with a bright red, ASAP priority tag. Where one manager for whom I did not work after another confidently promised away my time and never mention my name (I waited, largely for optimal dramatic effect, before nipping that shit in the bud.)

In ages past I've watched senior decision-makers punt on hiring really good people because those people would not commit to delivering on some batshit crazy deadlines that the senior exec had promised his boss, and then hire the first clown with executive hair and a firm handshake who would promise that, yeah…sure…I can build Rome in a day.

Of course Rome never gets built in a day. Or in six weeks, or six months, or two years. Or at all, because any competent Rome-builders have already been weeded out from day one because of their disruptive habit of telling the simple truth.

But by the time of the Great Reorganization Which Will Solve Whateverthefuck We Are Now Pretending The Problem Was, there will be a whole queue of demoralized, exhaustion-addled underlings who can be Pez-ed onto the grenade.

We who work know the routine.

Days evaporate. Evenings, weekends and holidays are all swallowed up into the “other duties as assigned” sinkhole.

Any discussion of the Sisyphusian impossibility of what we have been told to do is greeted with cavil lecture on the subject of better time management.

Any suggestion that it is a long-term bad idea to work a staff insane hours like grunts on PT for some passing whim that will be abandoned as soon as something newer and shinier catches the CEOs eye while he flips through “In Flight” magazine might as well come with a letter of resignation.

Because the dirty little secret of the world of work is that a vast number of working people spend the days and nights of their lives flogging dead, dying and wholly imaginary horses for no better reason than their boss thinks that it makes them look good.

From the Entertainment Guild:

...

In a bottom-line business like television, that's a cardinal sin. Already-low morale in the news division is dropping, says a veteran correspondent there.

"It's a disaster. Everybody knows it's not working. CBS may not cut her loose, but I guarantee you, somebody's thinking about it. We're all hunkered down, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Seven correspondents, producers and executives at CBS and other networks interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the Couric situation.
…

Couric's viewership has dropped nearly 30 percent since her Sept. 5 premiere week, when she averaged an inflated 10.2 million viewers and led CBS News to its first Nielsen win since June 2001.

In separate interviews, CBS News president Sean McManus and Evening News executive producer Rick Kaplan vehemently deny that Couric's future as anchor of the broadcast is in peril.

Couric "is the current anchor and the anchor of the future," McManus says. "Everyone at the network, from my boss [CBS Corp. president and chief executive Leslie Moonves] on down, is 100 percent behind her."

"Katie is the anchor until she decides to ride off into the sunset and do something else," says Kaplan, named e.p. March 8. "There is no one, no one, wringing their hands around here."

Others say CBS is in denial. "It's over. The only one who doesn't know it is CBS," says an executive at a rival network.
...
"I guess the evening news isn't ready for the morning news," quips Robert Lichter, president of Washington's Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Or, in the words of an NBC producer, "it's like asking a centerfielder to pitch. It's the same game, but requires totally different skills."

Contrary to popular opinion, gender is not an issue in the Couric situation, says Mediaweek.com analyst Marc Berman. "I give CBS a lot of credit for picking a woman. They just didn't pick the right woman."

Jennifer Pozner, executive director of New York's Women in Media & News, an educational and advocacy group, labels it "an infotainment issue."

"Couric came from Today, where bits of hard news are interspersed with diet tips and fall fashions." Had CBS hired Today coanchor Matt Lauer, the results would have been the same, Pozner says.

"Neither of them has the journalistic chops for the job. It's absolutely ridiculous that CBS wouldn't have predicted this."
…

To the chairmen of the business of making illegal war (shamelessly self-citing here):

...
Some of us knew full-well what it would probably be like to have a vicious, stupid, cowardly Imperial CEO, buffered from scrutiny a gutless, complicit Republican Congress.

A man who was hired by swine who view government – not Small government, or Large government, or Smart government or Responsive government…but ANY Government – as a failed product line full of nags and auditors to be gutted and outsourced so that Corporations could complete their evolution and take direct control of the United States. And use all of that yummy-yummy jurisprudent and military power to advance the causes and fortunes of the few.

And now, after five years of this tragedy of a Presidency and comedy of a Congress we can see the results: The craven bleatings of Kenny-Boy Lay and Heckuva-Job Dubya have become indistinguishable from one another, because they are both spun from the same ethically debased DNA.

Both men are the most degenerate example of the CEO culture where leaders not only are unaccountable, but arrogantly braying that they deserve to be unaccountable. That how DARE any mere mortal tread on that special set of Divine Law vouchsafed to them and them alone by their Boards and Almighty God to do whatever the fuck they want, whenever they damned well feel like it.

End Part 1.

Much of our world is run by such as these, and so, as I take my ease in the few unallocated hours between one very long day and the next, I cannot help but find the notion of an alien land where people have the time and leisure to ponder the best ways to apportion claims on their time -- “…because money is not (or shouldn't be) the point.” -- to occupy a region somewhere between back pain and bad porn.

File under “G”

For Genocide.

This from the NYT

April 22, 2007
In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South
By ERIK ECKHOLM

HOLLANDALE, Miss. — For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states.

The setbacks have raised questions about the impact of cuts in welfare and Medicaid and of poor access to doctors, and, many doctors say, the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and hypertension among potential mothers, some of whom tip the scales here at 300 to 400 pounds.

“I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average.

Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.)

The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481.

The toll is visible in Hollandale, a tired town in the impoverished Delta region of northwest Mississippi.

…

The main causes of infant death in poor Southern regions included premature and low-weight births; Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is linked to parental smoking and unsafe sleeping positions as well as unknown causes; congenital defects; and, among poor black teenage mothers in particular, deaths from accidents and disease.

Dr. William Langston, an obstetrician at the Mississippi Department of Health, said in a telephone interview that officials could not yet explain the sudden increase and were investigating. Dr. Langston said the state was working to extend prenatal care and was experimenting with new outreach programs. But, he added, “programs take money, and Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation.”

…

Poverty has climbed in Mississippi in recent years, and things are tougher in other ways for poor women, with cuts in cash welfare and changes in the medical safety net.

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.

“The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy,” she said.
…

In the Lost City of New Orleans, this Administration has already proven beyind any doubt just how utterly willing it is to sit idly by and let the poor and the brown die.

In its relentless jihad on science and the environment and reasonable gun control, just how uninterested it is in the health and well-being of it’s citizens.

In the smirking incompetent persona of Abu Gonzalez and his record of using the Constitution as ass-floss, just how much naked contempt it has for any concept of Justice.

The evidence for just how little it cares about lying to the public about matters of life and death is on prominent display every day in the blood-soaked streets of Iraq, and proof of its degenerate racism found in its enthusiastic embrace of the Southern Strategy to win elections, and its honored and feted spokesrodents found spouting riviers of hatespeech every hour of every day on AM Radio, year after year after year.

And genocide is still genocide even when it's carried out in slow motion, in the shadows and slums, and with a drawl.

At the other end of the spectrum

of the perilous world of dating.

The perilous world

of dating.

Yikes.

I imagine dozing off on the subway and unexpectedly waking up to this could freak one right out.

Still, I suppose it could be worse.

So, so much worse.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Special “Sinister Negroes and Their Devil Music Made Me Do It!” edition.


On Fox News. Republlican Bullshit. Episode 118: The Hunkering. In which Lindsay Graham sends the signal loud and clear that the GOP is not going to even pretend to listen to reason or facts any more.

They are settling into their trenches and, whatever the reality on the ground they’re just going lob out the GOP talking points of “Timetables, timelines, enemy roadmap, micromanagement” over and over and over and over again.

Chris Wallace was actually a little snippy with Grahamy this morning, interrupting him and reminding him that the Preznit has already set all kinds of benchmarks for the Iraqi government and they have blown them off. That civilian causalities are down in Baghdad, but way up in the countryside. That American casualties are going sharply upwards. That a string of car bombs have been going off daily and that the sanctum sanctorum of the Green Zone has been lethally penetrated in a way that cannot be misunderstood.

Wallace: So, Grahamy where’s the fuckin progress?

Graham: When I was there I saw that some sheiks have joined together to oppose al-Qaeda. And a buncha other stuff. Lemonade sales are up! Ponies! Also I saw a bunny. Also there were a couple of trials that weren’t lynchings.

And then he broke into song:

I bought Dubya's fiction (but we'll call it a War Plan)
(Surge City, here we come)
You know it's not gonna work, but we'll give it a freidman
(Surge City, here we come)
Well, it ain't got prayer and'll destroy the army
But still I'm gonna go along with President Smarmy


And we're goin' to Surge City, even though it's hundreds to one
You know we're goin' to Surge City, gonna have some fun
Ya, we're goin' to Surge City, even though it's hundreds to one
You know we're goin' to Surge City, gonna have some fun, now

Two tours for every boy
...

From now until autumn expect nothing from the Right but trench warfare and slander; it’s gonna be an ugly summer.

And speaking of ugly, on Face the Nation, wacky neighbor Dick Cheney stopped to lie for about 20 minutes, and repeatedly impugn the patriotism and honor of anyone who disagreed with his lies.

We learned that he has made no mistakes. He has never been wrong. He has never lied or misrepresented anything. That being “inconsistent” in one’s opinion is worse than nine Hitlers, even when “inconsistent” really means

1) Lending one’s conditional support to this Administration based on the long, sad parade of lies they trotted out as incontrovertible and absolute fact. And then,

2) Amending or revoking one’s support when one finds out one has been both massively lied to, and the war that was launched on the basis of those lies has been massively and criminally botched.

So by Dead-End Dick’s estimation, once a three card monte huckster fleeces you out of twenty bucks on the “el”, you are somehow forever morally obligated to continue to take the same train, play that same rigged game and endure being skinned out of your rent money by the same criminal, in the same way, day after day, year after year.

Forever.

Or until Mr. Devious Flimflamski declares “Victory” and deigns to release you from the bargain.

Cheney calmly explained that everything he has ever said was either accurate given what he knew at the time…or will be vindicated in the long “sweep of history”.

Dick Cheney was a very odd choice to be sent abroad to make the Administration’s case.

He is certainly the most loathed and mistrusted politician in a Party and Administation that is already red-lining its lack of credibility into Nixon territory. Someone that a broad consensus of our nation’s citizens seem to have concluded irrevocably is a truly evil and probably insane old prick who needs to be rotting the rest of his despicable days away in a 6X6 cell behind three feet of concrete and steel and a cordon of Marine guards.

Then again, at this point who else do the Bushies have left to Surge onto the Mouse Circus that won’t get slapped to atoms?

Finally, on Meet the Press, an extended meditation on what happens when the Bad Thing gets caught in the light reflecting off of Dom Imus’ colossal ego.

Allow me to explain.

Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Which is about half right.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the razory maw of the beast that bores its way though the bones of every malignantly dysfunctional family has the same name.

The Bad Thing.

The Bad Thing is the light-stealing singularity around which the malignantly dysfunctional family orbits. It is incest or serial abuse. It is violent alcoholism. Or murder. Or madness. Or evil. It is a terrorizing monster that demands that the outward face of the family always be molded plastic conformist perfection to mask its inner rot and pollution.

It is the evil that prowls around the kitchen table. That plants extra high hedges so outsiders do not see. A beast that that will flog a child for not smiling for the neighbors and performing as artificially and flawlessly as a horse being put through dressage. It is a smothering bedroom horror, as intimate and ruthless as the Stasi.

And since the Bad Thing strives above all to be invisible, the way you know you are within its event horizon is by measuring the behavior of its stooges and enablers when you find yourself in their presence. You do this by presenting them with irrefutable evidence of the reality of the Bad Thing and watching their reactions.

Their increasingly desperate, increasingly bizarre reactions.

Because once you become a servant of the Bad Thing, once you become dependent on the Bad Thing for your livelihood, you will do and say anything -- anything -- to keep from having to face the true villainy of what it is you have come to serve, and what it is you have allowed yourself to become to serve it.

So it was this Sunday on Meet the Press when Gwen Ifill – for whom I have not had a lot of love in the past – and Eugene Robinson (who I like a lot) delivered a truth-laden and withering lesson on the provenance and prevalence of hatespeech in the media. The casual viciousness of it, and the conspicuous fact that so many of the Media Elite have been so utterly complicit in letting things get so bad.

And Ms. Ifill did not deliver her measured and (for network teevee) harsh jeremiad in a vacuum. She delivered it sitting across from the whitest, pastiest, third-rate, soft-toned, media-bestriding apologist for Conservativism in America today: David Fucking Brooks.

Bobo: We have to remember that a lot of this is comedy? And other people like Howard Stern and Bill Mahr have to look out…

Ifill: Doesn’t comedy have to be funny?

John Harwood: What about Borat? Some people say he’s s stitch. But some people say…

Ifill: Oh fuck you. We know where the line is. We know where the offense is. But the best way to dilute this argument/discussion is to keep saying “What about this” and “What about that?”

Bobo: Borat is cruel too. He is cruel to people who are bad on teevee.

Bobo serves the Bad Thing and so Bobo is horribly uncomfortable with the dark corners into which the Imus tempest might blow his little pastel wingnut outrigger. He tried constantly and desperately to steer the conversation away from those scary rocks out into friendlier waters.

Out to a discussion of “the larger picture.”

“The public culture”.

To keep widening the lens until everything is as gray and flat and featureless as his prose.

Yes, kids, you are hearing right: the champions of lock-and-load, lock-em-up-forever, no-mealymouth-excuses-about-how-hard-your-life-has-been Personal Responsibility Conservativism (so long as we’re just talking about muggers and pickpocket and car thieves) and are now desperately and loudly trumpeting their new truth:

That…wait for it…waaaait for it…Society Is To Blame.

That the coarsening of the culture is to blame.

We have now lived long enough to see the Rich, Powerful White People’s Brigade sprint for shelter in the loving arms of “We Were Victims of Circumstances!”

And who is to blame for the plight of po’, po’, wealthy, Caucasian Elites who get caught using their positions of privilege and power to slam and slander the weak and powerless?

Why, those awful Negroes of course. And their Devil Jungle Music! And probably Bill Clinton too, although we’re not yet sure exactly how to string him up for this one just yet.

Ifill: Judge the man by his actions.

Ifill: There has been radio silence about this. Newsweek, who sends all of their reporters on that show, were completely silent over this. Until his show was cancelled. Then and only then did they announce that their people would no longer be treading the Imus boards.

Ifill: The reason it took so long for the media elite to speak up is that they were so deeply complicit.

Robinson: That’s what hurt so much. That these were the best and brightest. These were not the baggy pants kids.

It was, on the whole, a good discussion, but three huge points were mostly overlooked.

First, however lacerating language may be, there is a completely different tenor when using language to take on the powerful, the hateful, the bigoted and the enemies of civil society...and using that language to either premeditatedly or gratuitously beat on the weak, the powerless, the noble, the honorable, the poor, the sick, the lame, the halt, etc.

It is a categorically different thing for the landed and the privileged to thug on “the least of these”, and they fucking well know it, which is why the Right has had to pour so much time and money over the decades remarketing their whole mythology of victimhood.

That symphony of lies lifted wholesale from the dregs of the Confederacy and the White Supremacist movement to explain to the faithful why their leadership caste of rich, tubby, white bigots and their orc legions are really The Oppressed.

That entire encyclopedia of mendacity devoted to explaining why Bible-pounding, Christ-defiling demagogues with their own satellite networks, teevee stations, coast-to-coast radio empires, publishing houses, marketing firms, think tanks, congressmen, senators, embedded journalists, President, political Party, newspapers, tax-free rivers of revenue, Constitutionally-protected citadels, and a dozen doggie-doors straight into the heart of the White House...are really a horribly put-upon minority. Are really being subjugated by the Sekrit Liberal Elite Media Cabals working to destroy America by aiding terrorists and working with atheist scientists to take away our freedom by faking up a “Global Warming” crisis. The entire operations is run by man-hating feminists, abortionists and obscure assistant professors, accessorized and sexualized by queers, with muscle provided by Dirty Commie Labor Unions, soundtrack provided by Welfare Queens and funding by George Soros.

Second, the panel almost entirely avoided noticing that for twenty years the Right has made its political bones openly trafficking in the Bad Thing.

That the Conservative movement owes its electoral successes entirely to its efficient cultivation of the rawest, ugliest and most virulent hatespeech imaginable, and the harvesting of its poison fruits at election time. That far from paying the kind of steep cultural price these weak children and neocon stalking horses of the MSM suddenly seem giddily anxious to charge to everyone’s account equally regardless of rank, privilege or context (in the name of Holy “Fairness”), the Right has been lavishly rewarded for adopting the language, habits and attitudes of racists, sexists, homophobes and theocrats.

Third, the embrace of White Supremacist ideological infrastructure dressed up in Biblical language was not an accident. This was done by the Right willingly, carefully and by design. For twenty years the Right has pioneered the use of 1,000 decibel demonization, slander and lies as a matter of tactical necessity. Their leaders and elite media apologist like David Brooks know it, but for twenty years they have stayed silent regarding the simple fact that the entire Ponsi Scheme of Conservativism is built on hateful words and despicable ideas.

Which means that without Limbaugh and Coulter…

Without Hannity and Hume…

Without Will and Gingrich…

Without DeLay and Drudge…

Without Coulter and Malkin…

Without O’Reilly and Savage…

Without Dobson and Cheney…

Without Goldberg and Lott…

Without Falwell and Robertson…

Without Schafly and Tancredo…

Without all the rest of that loud, vile, Democracy-loathing freak-show...

There. Is. No. Republican. Party.

Period.

There. Is. No. Conservative. Movement.

Period.

Without their legion of demagogues, all of those cozy think tanks and glorious corporate welfare giveaways and high value-added wars and plush teevee pundit gigs would vanish in a puff of stink and a flutter of Confederate flags.

They are The Bad Thing and so, for twenty years, The Bad Thing has remained frantically unacknowledged and deafeningly unheard by the David Brookses of the world.

But now the Bad Thing has crawled onto a national stage and take a huge shit under a big spotlight, which is why the Media Bobos are freaked out.

Because the god-fearing, Party of Personal Responsibility Conservatives are terrified that the general public will finally notice that they are the ones who bear the primary responsibility for premeditatedly eradicated civil discourse in our society.

Terrified of finally being forced to submit to that paternity test.

You know what’s fun?

Taking exactly the same set of facts and actually seeing how they are digested by Science People and Fundamentalist Idiots in nearly real time.

Sorta like raising sea monkeys, or keeping an ant farm.

Or, rather, like watching scientists debate cosmology on teevee, and then watching sea monkeys debate ants over real nature and purpose of the Mighty Provider Of Sea Monkey Food and whether He is a superior deity to the All Knowing Deliverer of Sugary Goodness.

Of course, sea monkeys are notorious perverts


and ants are bent on the subjugation of all humanity


so maybe not the best examples I could have chosen.

Still, one works with what one has.

So consider this story – “Abstinence education doesn't work: report” – and how the facts of the study are presented here, by both “Scientific American” the “Christian Post”.

A few of the first paragraphs are nearly identical (from Scientific American)…

"For both the program and control group youth, the reported mean age at first intercourse was identical, 14.9 years," says the report, available on the Internet at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abstinence07/index.htm.

Teens in both groups were just as likely to use condoms or birth control, the report found -- countering the fears of critics of abstinence-only education, who say children ignorant of how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases will simply have more unprotected sex.

For the report, Christopher Trenholm and colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. interviewed more than 2,000 teenagers with an average age of 16 1/2. They lived in rural and urban communities in Florida, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Virginia.

About 1,200 of them had taken part in abstinence-only education programs four to six years before.

"Over the last 12 months, 23 percent of both groups reported having had sex and always using a condom; 17 percent of both groups reported having had sex and only sometimes using a condom; and 4 percent of both groups reported having had sex and never using a condom," the researchers wrote.
...

But where normal people see data and trends and might move for an honest, fact-based debate how these new, hard-won facts should be used to inform public policy while taking note of who was trying to suppress the report and who was not,

…
The report, ordered by Congress, was not released by the Health and Human Services Department, but by activists and by California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's office. An HHS spokeswoman did not answer a request for a comment.

…
The report revived the debate on government abstinence-only education programs, which are strongly supported by the administration of President George W. Bush.
"Program and control group youth also did not differ in the number of partners with whom they had sex," they added.

About 25 percent in both groups had already had sex with three or more partners.
"This data supports what a growing body of public health evidence has indicated: Abstinence-only programs don't protect teen health," said Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives Government Oversight Committee.

"In short, American taxpayers appear to have paid over one billion federal dollars for programs that have no impact."

The report said the federal government has spent $87.5 million annually since 1998 for abstinence-only education programs.

Activists said the findings showed that children need more comprehensive education about abstinence, contraception and sex in general.

"The vast majority of the public does not see abstinence and contraception as an either/or proposition -- they want teens to be informed of both," Sarah Brown, Executive Director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said in a statement.

"We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that's not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics," added James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth.
…

Fundicrats, on the other hand, look at every ham sandwich and oil slick and see the Blessed Virgin Mary.

From the Christian Post:

...
A prominent Christian public policy group says the new report is timed to affect funding.

Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, pointed out several flaws to the study including the ages of the students involved.

"The targeted children were too young to absorb the abstinence message, and there was no follow-up to the original abstinence message," said Crouse in a statement. "This basic flaw in the study design invalidates any findings in the report."

Similarly, Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families, said the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior, according to AP.

"This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can't expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth's high school career," he said.

"Values" that are taught in the programs is also a significant issue, Crouse noted.

"Comprehensive sex education is not values based. Yet, sex involves values – especially the values of commitment, love and intimacy," Crouse stated. "If values are omitted, the teaching implies that casual teen sex has no lasting consequences as long as the teens use a condom."

Still, some say the study provides evidence that federal money should be used for comprehensive sex education.

...

Yes, “some say” those terrible, terrible things. Things like demanding that any educational system should be specifically designed to teach critical thinking skills above all else.

That it is OK to wade into a murky world of facts and experts and sacred cows without fear. That it is positively the duty of a free citizen to punt a belief out the window when it turns out to have been wrong.

That an educational system should NOT hold as its highest “value” strapping children’s minds into some Dark Ages Fundy Procrustean Bed so that the degenerative sickness of Christopathology can be passed on generation after generation like hemophilia.

So let us return to the compare-and-contrast exercise of Free Press versus the reportage of the Dominionist Pantograph with these, two sentences from the Christian Post version of reality:

“A prominent Christian public policy group says the new report is timed to affect funding.

“Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, pointed out several flaws to the study including the ages of the students involved.”

See, when you refer to someone as “Doctor” in the context of what is essentially a discussion of the medical efficacy of one methodology over another, you run the risk of making people think that “Doctor” Crouse was leaning on some medical expertise to bulwark her ridiculous opinion.

But when you take the trouble – as a real reporters might do -- to examine her bio, and find that she is, among other things…

Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Taylor University.

Formerly Professor and Debate Coach at Asbury College and at Ball State University.

Member of the Board of Trustees of Asbury College

Member of the Board of Directors for Good News

Oh and she was a speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, but after that the credential cupboard stands conspicuously bare, so despite the many really, really spiffy circle-jerk blurbs written about her status as “nationally recognized speaker” for all of their hot-button bigotries by lots other extreme, right wing organizations, “Doctor” Crouse just another freedom-hating theocrat who puts her Christopath ideology before science, fact and humanity every fucking time.

She does, however, have the full backing of the “Beverly LaHaye Institute”.

Which was founded by the wife of Tim LaHayne.

Who is the co-author of the multi-million best-selling crimes against both Christianity and Literature known as the “Left behind” series.

So she’s got that going for her.

And speaking of things that a real reporter might have bothered to mention, let us pause for a moment in remembrance of the Fallen Paragraphs.

Those heroic, explanatory nuggets of text that can limn an issue so clearly and cleanly but which, for reasons known only to wingnut editors and propaganda-slinging “reporters”, are consistently and conspicuously omitted from the day-to-day reportage of their news.

The Exiled Clauses. Those snippets of narrative, the absence of which, like the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night, fairly leap off the page once you learn to see the blast-shadow of where they should be between the lines of what finally made it onto the page or screen.

Like when you hear an organization whose name just reeks to Humanist Heaven with that telltale, “Happy Puppy Club For A Better Tomorrow”, Orwellian double-think naming convention deathstink the Party of God now uses to perfume its every perfidious evil.

Like, say, “Concerned Women for America”, which should send even a junior reporter fresh out of J-for-journalism-not-Jebus-school positively sprinting for the internets where he or she could easily find Exciting and Highly Relevant Background Information such as this from the good people over at the People for the American Way:

…
[The] CWA opposes gay rights, comprehensive sex education, drug and alcohol education, and feminism, while advocating what it calls “pro-life” and “pro-family” values.
…

CWA is anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-feminism and anti-sex education. Beverly LaHaye started CWA to respond to the advances of feminism after watching NOW founder Betty Friedan on television in 1978. CWA identifies feminism as “anti-god, anti-family.” CWA identifies state-level Equal Rights Amendments (ERAs) as responsible for the breakdown of families, “The ERA proposes the elimination of our God-given roles as men and women, resulting in the redefinition -- and eventual destruction -- of family.”

Some of the CWA’s activities include:

· CWA has lobbied against the Freedom of Choice Act and gay rights legislation in many states. Grassroots activity in most states is led by a CWA Area Representative and a steering committee. According to its 2003 990 Report, CWA spent a total of $92,560 in lobbying expenditures to influence both public opinion and legislative bodies.

· CWA fights against sex education curricula that is not completely abstinence based and opposes anti-drug and alcohol abuse programs that emphasize self-esteem. Many challengers to books and curricula in public schools use CWA-produced materials.

· CWA has been active in the fight against using Harry Potter books in schools. Publications such as “Harry Potter: Seduction of the Occult” claim that the books promote the practice of witchcraft among children. CWA offers books and videos such as, “Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged: Making Evil Look Innocent.” (Produced by Tim LaHaye, Beverly LaHaye’s husband.)

· CWA has also been active in supporting the teaching of Creationism and “Intelligent Design theory” in science classrooms.

· CWA’s anti-gay work covers many issues, from supporting the Boy Scouts of America ban against gay participants, to opposing any openly gay people in President Bush’s administration. CWA has been active in opposing any and all gay and lesbian civil rights measures, including supporting the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians in employment.

…
· As a leader of the religious right, Beverly and her husband Tim LaHaye are strong supporters of other Religious-Right groups and leaders. For instance, in the summer of 2001 the LaHayes gave Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University $4.5 million. (Beverly LaHaye is a trustee of the university.)

…
· In 2002, CWA vehemently opposed ratification of CEDAW (the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), claiming its pro-women empowerment and equality sections comprised a “leftist utopian wish list.” The Convention, which opposes the discrimination or subordination of women across the globe, was criticized by LaHaye Institute Fellow Janice Shaw Crouse, as imposing contemporary colonialist, neo-Marxist agendas. CEDAW was ratified on January 7, 2005, by 71 countries, and endorsed by 76 signatories. The United States was not one of them.

Any and all of which they are, of course, entirely within their rights to do and say and believe, because this is still America, and one is still free to promote any medieval, narrow-minded and repellently anti-American and anti-Christian drivel one chooses.

But having “Doctor” in front of one’s name doesn’t mean you aren’t contemptible, and slapping “Concerned” onto your letterhead doesn’t mean that you aren’t a theocrat, and reporters and editors of this story who failed to disclose the real radical agenda behind the CWA are either lazy or lying by omission, but either way they failed spectacularly here in their basic responsibility to make sure the public is in possession of all the facts pertinent to a particular story.

But then again, from women and their bodies to children and their education to the Earth and its true genesis and fate, hasn’t it always been the very profitable business of the Party of God to martyr every problematic fact and crucify every inconvenient truth to promote their agenda of ignorance, hatred and fear unfettered by reality?

Oh, and the final litmus test?

Anyone who can pass along this golden line

“But Bush administration officials have cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study...”

from the very same people that lied us into a war with this...

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

...and this...

"We know where [the WMDs] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

...and this...

“I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.”

...and this...

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

...and this...

“Costs of any such intervention would be very small.”

...and this...

“There’s just no reason that this can’t be an affordable endeavor.”

...and this...

“There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

...and this...

“…"the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

...as straight dope and without going taser-to-the-genitals helpless with laughter and then throwing up into their wastebasket cannot possibly be a real journalist.