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The Vidiot's
weekly blog:
What
pissed me off this week? 8/15/2005
(updated
every Monday at some point during the day)
...'cause
I'm angry and my friends are sick of listening to me...
Cost
of the War in Iraq
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Everyone is going
on and on about Cindy
Sheehan. While I'll agree that what she is doing is fairly remarkable,
she herself may not be all that remarkable. I mean, she's a pissed off
mom. Have you ever seen a pissed off mom? I have. Mine used to be able
to put the fear of God in me just by looking at me. So, I don't want to
worship the woman. And I don't think she should be president
either.(Why is it that anytime someone does anything extraordinary, people
think that they're qualified to run the country? Nominate for her a Nobel
Peace Prize, yes. Ask Jimmy
Carter to do it. Since he's won one, he's able to nominate.)
She should be respected
for what she's doing however. She has the wingers
on the defense
(with guns
and everything) and she's making GW look
worse than usual.
It's a total lose/lose situation for him. If he meets with her, he appears
weak. If he doesn't, he seems like an asshole.
Actually, it says
a lot about him that he's chosen "asshole".
"I
grieve for every death," he said. Then why haven't you attended
a single funeral, shithead?
Jeebus.
We know he's not
going to meet with her. And she'll have no choice to but to follow him
to D.C. when he returns after labor day. Maybe, like this
dailykos entry suggests, she's exactly what the peace movement needs.
She's someone people can really wrap their heads around. No matter what
you may feel about Bush, or the war, or anything, nobody (except for that
shithead
Erick over at Red State) can say anything bad about her. Let's hope
Bush really embraces his "asshole" persona and carries it on through September.
If he hasn't met with her by September
24, the day of the next large protest in D.C., it could cause the
protest to explode.
Meanwhile, let's
not forget the wounded. This is from my uncle who served in the military
when it wasn't so popular. He knows of what he speaks (This is his reaction
to TruthOut.org's
Cindy Sheehan video):
Please give me
a while to digest. You know, us old guys don't track as fast as we used
to. Or maybe, we just chew slower. In any case, just a thought: where
were all those folks in '64 - '75? Gee! I think over 58,000 of
my buddies came home in body bags. And while we're thinking about the
soldiers who died in Iraq, let us not forget the wounded. As of 4 July
2005, the US Army Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany treated the 25,000th
wounded from Iraq & Afghanistan. No, not all were serious.
Some were the normal things that happen to young folks who are active.
But the rest? Missing arms/legs? 18-yr-old kids without lower
extrems? And let us not mention the cost to you, the tax payer, to care
for these cases. Sorry to carry on so long, but of the two tours I had
in 'Nam, the worse one was the year I spent in Valley Forge Hospital
in PA. The young amputees/burn victims/blind, etc. They live with
me till this day - and with my wife who witnessed them, too. The
dead are dead. But...
'Nuff said.
Hack
of the Week: Elevators
Music video
of the Week: Green
Day's "Wake me up when September Ends"
Tech of
the Week: Free
Software
List of
the Week: If
I were an Evil Overlord
Site of
the Week: Mailboxes
Media Site
of the Week: Phallic
Signifiers
Another
Site of the Week: Toonopedia
Must-Read
of the Week: Morford
on Liberals
Nightmare
of the Week: Cheney
'08
Media Revolution
Idea of the Week: Echo
Chamber Project
Blog of
the Week: Live
from Crawford with Cindy
Video of
the Week: Bush
vacation is stupid
Programming
note: Cynthia McKinney held a briefing on the 9/11 commission
report. It will
be aired on C-SPAN2 from 8:00 pm to 11:30 pm on Wednesday, August
31 and from 8:00 pm to 1:00 am on Friday, September 2.
Asshole
of the Week This
mother.
Excerpt:Staff Sgt.
Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home
of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine
Reserve to talk to his parents.
It was a large
home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned
the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
"I want you
to know we support you," she gushed.
Rivera soon reached
the limits of her support.
"Military
service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she
told him.
(saw it on Atrios)
Durr
of the Week It doesn't
take a genius to have noticed that the economy is leaving
a lot of people behind.
Excerpt: Treasury
Secretary John W. Snow acknowledged yesterday that the fruits of strong
economic growth are not spreading equally to less educated Americans,
as he and the rest of President Bush's economic team prepared to meet
today to discuss wages and income distribution in an otherwise surging
economy.
And gee, this
wasn't a news flash either.
Excerpt; Housing
prices are far outstripping salary increases for low- and moderate-income
jobs, putting the American dream of owning a home beyond the reach of
teachers, firefighters and other community workers in many cities, said
a study being released Tuesday.
Those lowest on the totem poll
get screwed
the most.
Excerpt; Low-income
households will soon pay 10 percent more for electricity because budget
writers raided a discount program for the poor to help balance the state
budget.
Eh. Whatever. We're practically
a third
world anyway.
Excerpt;On many
quality of life issues, including the quality of education, health care,
the environment, the general public seems to believe that the United
States is near the top relative to other countries. Where does the United
States really stand? You may be surprised.
Headline
of the Week "WMD
Message Failure Damaging Bush." Yeah. It's the message.
Excerpt: President
Bush's decision to concede the argument that Iraq had no weapons of
mass destruction has hurt his credibility badly, with a majority of
Americans now saying he lied when he took the country to war based on
a threat that didn't exist.
Classic.
This
Week in Conspiracies There's
been some buzz on the 'net regarding upcoming terror drills regarding
nuclear issues in August
Excerpt: Sudden
Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried
out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to
train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations
in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV’s
response to a nuclear detonation.
and that the fired
general
Excerpt: The Army,
in a rare disciplinary act against a four-star officer, said Tuesday
it relieved Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes of his command in the midst of an investigation
into unspecified "personal conduct."
might've
been trying to stop it.
Excerpt: As a hypothetical
scenario, was/is something being done that General Byrnes disapproved
of, and has someone maneuvered him out of the picture to get someone
more accomodating and tractable into Fort Monroe?
Perhaps he's a
regular Smedley
Butler.
Excerpt: I am reminded
of Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history,
who told the Congress in 1933 that a failed coup had been plotted by
plutocratic industrialists to overthrow the government of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Well, there's also a rumor
that most military leave has been cancelled after September 7.
Excerpt: Lehrman
said that other sources had told him all army leave had been cancelled
from September 7th onwards, opening the possibility for war to be declared
within that time frame.
Which would jibe with Bush's
recent
statements regarding Iran
Excerpt:US President
George W. Bush refused to rule out the use of force against Iran over
the Islamic Republic's resumption of nuclear activities, in an interview
aired on Israeli television.
And a September
deadline that's been imposed.
Excerpt: Diplomats
speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized
to discuss the proceedings publicly said Tehran faced a Sept. 3 deadline
to stop or face another possible referral to the Security Council, which
has the power to impose crippling sanctions.
Well, alls I can say is, reaffirm
your life while you can, people! It's going to be a bumpy ride. Especially
if they "have
to" declare martial law.
Excerpt:According
to a report published Monday by the Washington Post, the Pentagon has
developed its first ever war plans for operations within the continental
United States, in which terrorist attacks would be used as the justification
for imposing martial law on cities, regions or the entire country.
Guaranteed there'll be a baby
boom 9 months after that. I mean, what else are you going to be able to
do but life-affirming activities.
Here's
what's wrong with Kansas With
Kansas schools finally allowed to criticize
evolution,
Excerpt:The Kansas
Board of Education voted 6-4 Tuesday to include greater criticism of
evolution in its school science standards, but it decided to send the
standards to an outside academic for review before taking a final vote.
I've finally found a reasonable
explanation of Intelligent Design.
Excerpt: In a nutshell
(one designed exclusively for the Earth Range by Almighty God and not
some cheap, evolved knock-off) I.D. proponents argue that sure there's
a lot of evidence to support evolution and yes scientific models of
the universe's creation do seem to bear out pretty well in experiments
and okay natural selection does appear to explain the many varied and
wondrous shapes that nature has produced over the countless millions
and billions of years but maybe that's what we're supposed to think,
huh, huh? I.D. supporters point out that life is really, really complex
and can cause headaches if thought about too hard so doesn't Occam's
Razor indicate that it's much more likely that an omnipotent and omniscient
divinity thought "Wait! What about a little horse that swims underwater?"
Which just begs another question:
Where
Are All The Funny Conservative Bloggers?
Excerpt: On the
right, though, there is a noticeable absence. There are IMAO,
Scrappleface and, I suppose, Lileks. Outside of them, it's all
self-righteousness and persecution complex, all the time. And
outside of the three listed above, when a conservative blogger does
employ humor, I find that usually it's in retelling a joke they read
somewhere else.
Revolving
Door This
is just wrong and should be illegal.
Excerpt:Michael
Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission,
has joined Providence Equity Partners, a private-equity company focused
on investing in media and communications companies.
Under
the Radar
Bush installed
Doug Feith's replacement, quietly and without fanfare.
Excerpt: President
George W. Bush today named Eric S. Edelman undersecretary of defense
for policy, using his power to make temporary appointments while Congress
is in recess to overcome potential Democrat opposition to the nomination.
He's Cheney's
man.
Excerpt: Cheney
during the administration of the president's father. At that time he
worked as part of a team headed by Paul Wolfowitz that was charged with
formulating a Defense Policy Guidance that would serve as the post-Cold
War framework for U.S. military strategy. Others working on the draft
grand strategy were Zalmay Khalilzad and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief
of staff. According to Nicholas Lehman, writing in the New Yorker, this
team picked by Cheney was "generally speaking, a cohesive group
of conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded,
and intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington."
In the draft Defense Policy Guidance, Wolfowitz and team laid out a
policy agenda for U.S. military power that stipulated that the U.S.
should wage preventive war to maintain unchallenged U.S. military supremacy.
Why did Feith need to be replaced?
Remember, he ran the OSP, a.k.a. The
Lie Factory. He resigned, ostensibly for "personal reasons",
but probably really because the AIPAC scandal is too close for comfort.
Larry
Franklin, the guy implicated in the AIPAC scandal worked directly
with Feith.
And don't forget that the whole
AIPAC thing could fold right into the whole Valerie Plame/Niger forgeries
thing via Judy
Miller and Scooter Libby, which of course, runs smack dab into Dick
Cheney.
Excerpt: Scooter
Libby and jailed reporter Judy Miller met just two days after Joe Wilson
published his column -- and Patrick Fitzgerald is very interested.
But will any of it ever get
out? The media is complicit
in the coverup.
Excerpt: In an
article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael
Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news
media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who knew
that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would
have been “one of the biggest stories of the Bush years.”
Not only that, “they helped cover it up.” You might say,
he adds, they “became part of a conspiracy.”
But how long can they hid it?
It's huuuuge.
Monsanto
= Evil It's a good
thing God didn't file patents.
Excerpt: It's official.
Monsanto Corporation is out to own the world's food supply, the dangers
of genetic engineering and reduced biodiversity notwithstanding, as
they pig-headedly set about hog-tying farmers with their monopoly plans.
We've discovered chilling new evidence of this in recent patents that
seek to establish ownership rights over pigs and their offspring.
Watch
out, Hugo. Are we
going to war with Venezuela next? Seems that way. The old, familiar
steps are being taken, like sanctions.
Excerpt; The United
States is considering punishing Venezuela with sanctions for breaking
off work with US anti-drug agents in the world's top cocaine-exporting
region, the State Department has said .
And contingency
plans.
Excerpt: Merco
Press agency reports that the United States Congress has begun considering
consequences of a potential Venezuelan petroleum cut off given the country's
"political instability".
He's definitely pissing
off the status quo.
Excerpt: Six of
Venezuela's indigenous communities received title to their ancestral
lands on Tuesday in a ceremony that Venezuela's president said reversed
centuries of injustice.
And pissing off big-bidness.
Excerpt: Venezuela's
tax agency asked a court for an injunction on Royal Dutch Shell PLC
assets worth US$130 million (euro105 million) or more amid a tax dispute
with the oil company, the government said Thursday.
And doing a little tit-for-tat.
Excerpt: American
citizens could be denied visas to visit Venezuela in response to a U.S.
decision to revoke the visas of three Venezuelan military officers,
the vice president said Friday.
Ever
Hopeful Abramoff
is going down.
Excerpt: Federal
prosecutors are seeking bank fraud charges against lobbyist Jack Abramoff,
a key figure in investigations involving House Majority Leader Tom DeLay,
The Associated Press learned Thursday.
Maybe he'll take DeLay
with him.
Excerpt: A federal
audit of a political fundraising committee founded by House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay found that it failed to report more than $300,000 in
debts owed to vendors and incorrectly paid for some committee activities
with money from another DeLay-connected political committee.
Buyer
Beware While on
the one hand, it's a good thing that a major paper is raising
some issues regarding the official 9/11 story.
Excerpt: Towers
that fell ‘like a controlled demolition’. Planes that
vanished then mysteriously reappeared, And crucial evidence that
has been lost for ever. A new book raises bizarre yet deeply unsettling
questions about the world’s worst terror atrocity…..
But one must be careful. If
any story that tries to discuss alternative 9/11 storylines mentions the
whole "pods on the planes" thing or the "there was no airplane at the
Pentagon" thing with out sarcasm or extreme cynicism, be wary of the article's
overall agenda. It's called "poisoning
the well." Like this.
On that list you'll see that there are plenty of credible websites mixed
in with the not-so-credible ones. What does that do? It makes the credible
websites guilty by association. Be discerning, people.
Going
Insane I think Rumsfeld
has finally lost
his mind.
Excerpt; Some weapons
entering Iraq are coming from Iran, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
said Tuesday, though he indicated it was unclear whether they were coming
from elements of the Iranian government or from other parties.
OK, maybe that's par for the
course, but this
is DEFINATELY insane.
Excerpt; The Pentagon
will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth
anniversary of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an unusual
announcement tucked into an Iraq war briefing yesterday.
A celebration of 9/11?
WTF??!! Even the right-wingers
are flummoxed.
Excerpt; "The
word 'crass' immediately comes to mind. Call me crazy, but I just don't
think that a commemoration of 9/11 should be mixed in with a 'support
the troops' march. You know what this is? A thinly veiled pro-war rally.
And concert!"
Well, that's ok I guess. If
Rumsfeld is nuts, apparently
he's got plenty of company.
Excerpt;A new study
by Harvard University and the National Institute of Mental Health (search)
claims that 46 percent of all Americans will, at some point in their
lives, develop a mental disorder.
My
newest favorite journalist I'm
a new fan of Matt Taibi. This
article he wrote for Rolling Stone on his Hunter Thompson-like
reporting on Congressional procedure is awesome.
Excerpt:The current
chairman, David Dreier, is a pencil-necked Christian Scientist from
Southern California, with exquisite hygiene and a passion for brightly
colored ties. While a dependable enough yes man to have remained Rules
chairman for six years now, he is basically a human appendage, a prosthetic
attachment on the person of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. "David
carries out the wishes of the Republican leadership right down the line,''
said former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, until last year the committee's
ranking Democrat.
So I guess I'll have to read
his
book.
Organized
Religion is Absurd So,
what's the big deal about separation of church and state? I mean, if you
don't want to pray, don't pray, right?
Wrong.
Excerpt: Residents
of a Westmont public housing complex for seniors said in a federal lawsuit
filed Monday that they were coerced and harassed by management into
practicing Christianity and pressured to attend Bible study classes.
Don't they know religion can
kill
you?
excerpt: A woman
died crushed by an iron crucifix at the entrance of the church of San
Lorenzo while she was attending mass in the city's patron saint's celebrations.
The
Black Plague of Journalism Excellent
satire regarding Novakula.
Excerpt: Network
executives acted Thursday after Novak's body staggered to its feet in
the middle of a joint interview with the mummified remains of James
Carville, and vomited a noxious heap of its own decomposed organs directly
into the lap of CNN host Ed Henry. The reanimated corpse then lurched
off the set, leaving a trail of wriggling maggots and liquified fecal
matter behind it.
News
of the Weird I wonder
why it is that most of my weird news stories have something to do with
animals and/or sex?
This
one's about a bridge that causes dogs to commit suicide.
Excerpt: Nobody
knows for sure, but something strange is causing dogs to jump off the
Overtoun Estate bridge, west of Glasgow, at an alarming rate. Most are
killed by the 60-foot fall or are so severely injured that veterinarians
must put them to sleep. Others have survived, only to come back and
try again.
This man had sex with a horse...
and died.
Excerpt: "We
tried to make it as tasteful as possible keeping out the cause of death.
As a surprise, I had at least 70 emails from people and the vast majority
wanted to know what killed this guy," she said. "So on the
second day we had to be more specific."
A Praying Mantis can kill
and eat a hummingbird. I did not know that.
Excerpt: The other
day while I was working in the yard my son urgently called to me. "Dad,
a praying mantis caught a hummingbird!"
Then again, maybe it's just
me.
Previous
rants
What do we do about all of
this crap? I have no idea. Part of me wants to start teach-ins
at my local pub. Just go to the bar, rant and rave and inform the idiots
who still think Brian Williams is telling them the truth. I sincerely believe
that if we protected the voting rights of the underprivileged that any Democrat
could SWEEP any election. I don't think Democrats are the answer. But they
are at least a start.
At the
very least, point your CNN-loving friends to my links
page. Just getting started in reading alternate news sites gets people
thinking. I have one friend who was very happy-go-lucky, thinking ol'
Greta was telling the whole truth until I opened up his eyes a bit. Now,
he's all depressed. He'll get over it. You gotta' get depressed before
you get angry and you gotta' get angry before you can accomplish anything.
We're all in mourning. We have to move through the steps. But we gotta'
hurry it up.
Read. Inform.
Spread the word. Even if it means your friends avoid you for awhile. If
they really love you, they'll start to listen.
"POSSE
COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385): A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing
use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly
authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian
law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional
laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military
assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially
in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications
emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities,
vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally
prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g.,
search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement
Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual
boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed,
arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from
Navy ship/aircraft involvement.
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