Sunday, February 01, 2009

A HOF performance


That could also have been said of Arizona's Kurt Warner, who got his team the lead late but with 2:08 too much for Ben Roethlisberger to work his magic.

Each quarterback was in search of his second Super ring; each was masterful, but the championship goes to Big Ben and the Steelers.

A few more Funnies




Yoo Idiot

Oops.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

After attorney general-designate Eric Holder testified in his confirmation hearing that waterboarding was torture, Dick Cheney made the rounds of teevee talking heads to declare that it was he who had authorized the torturing of detainees at Guantanamo. Maybe that was just Dick being Dick, maybe he was trying to take the heat off Bush, but Yoo -- whose legal memos paved the way for the lovely euphemism "enhanced interrrogation techniques" -- lets the cat out of the bag here, fingering the former President of the United States.

John Cornyn's bullshit starts to make a little more sense in context of his slavish and utter devotion to protecting Bush at all costs, doesn't it?

There's a grander context here that I want to explore, however.

Most reasonable people -- including many practitioners of it -- acknowledge that torture does not work. But "work" is a loaded word.

If your intention is to extract factual information regarding terrorism then, no, torture doesn't work. But if your intention is to coerce confessions out of people who are essentially innocent, THEN IT WORKS. It works as a cover-up for your vacuous "war on terror" and its attendant policies such as wiretapping Americans, as well as a distraction for your own state-sponsored, false-flag terrorism. It works as a means to intimidate people who would speak up against you, too. It has all sorts of viable uses depending upon your intentions. And since the idea was at the time to use 9/11 as a justification to nullify constitutionally protected rights and thus implement the equivalent of an enforceable police state, one could say that having a policy of torture was essential to the plan.

It's probably safe to say that it worked well enough to get Congressional Republican majorities re-elected in 2002, and Bush re-elected in 2004.

So now that sanity has prevailed, and we have an administration and a Congress that is gradually enabling itself to acknowledge the truth, the remaining and reasonable course of action is to follow the dictates of the treaties and accords signed by predecessors of George W Bush and investigate and prosecute all of those in his administration responsible for the violations.

Let justice prevail though the heavens fall, someone once said.

Friday, January 30, 2009

GOP searches for relevance *update*

They won't be able to find it with a mirror and both hands:

Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?

So very, very much for the Republicans to ponder in this Winter of the Democrats' Contentment. So many questions. Even the reliable color scheme has gone blurry. Isn't that big-shot GOP strategist Alex Castellanos swirling Republican red with Democrat blue, and coming up with a Washington consulting shop called -- heavens! -- "Purple?" Why, yes.

"Sit tight," the new firm's Web site says. "We are still mixing the colors."

...

"We're in this rebuilding time," Monica Notzon, a Washington-based Republican fundraiser, helpfully explained this month. "Trying to figure out who we are."

It is into this new world order, this Washington version of an existential whorl, that a steadfastly loyal group of Republicans descend this week, skidding into an iced-over landscape and holing up at the Capital Hilton beginning yesterday for a four-day winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. (Not to be missed on the restorative agenda: a "Reboot the RNC" open house.) They've themed the whole get-together "Republican for a Reason," and left it at that.

"Republican for a reason?" says Stephen Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, pausing before a banner carrying the slogan. "I don't know what that means."

Why, it means obstruction and blockage. It means they are against American economic recovery because not a single one of them voted for an American economic stimulus plan. It means they don't want torturers in the past administration prosecuted, and it means they still hate France.

Contenders for the RNC slot include former Ohio vote suppressor Ken Blackwell, and and the Great State's very own Tina Fish of Texas, who promise more kow-towing to the extreme right-wing.

I think that's going to work out real well:

The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

No matter how miserably the GOP may fail at a comeback nationally, I would imagine that the freaks here in Texas who keep electing them will remain at least ten years behind the times.


Update
: Annnnnnnnnnd it's Michael Steele.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Limbaugh found dead, thousands commit suicide

Popular right-wing radio host and titular head of the Republican party Rush Limbaugh was found dead tonight in his home of an apparent heart attack.

Preliminary results indicate a prescription drug overdose aggravated by Limbaugh's morbid obesity. Several empty bottles of the prescription drugs Viagra and Oxycontin were found littering the scene.

An attending coroner said that Limbaugh had ingested enough medication "to kill Elvis ten times over", and admitted to having never seen such a high level of the drugs in any human being. Limbaugh was found in an upright position on his $743,000 solid gold, extra-large commode, with a microphone in one hand. (The toliet had recently been acquired from former Texas House speaker Tom Craddick, who previously had it installed in the plush living quarters afforded the head of the Lone Star State's legislative body.)

As initial reports of Limbaugh's demise hit the airways, thousands of his devoted listeners began to take their own lives in various gruesome ways, many leaving behind suicide notes indicating that they simply couldn't go on without their daily 3 hours of right wing propaganda five times a week.

Hundreds of mortuaries across the nation are overflowing with deceased dittoheads, and emergency rooms are full of botched suicides and hundreds of 'walking dead' Limbaugh devotees, all of whom seem to be in a semi-catatonic state. Numerous accounts from around the nation report that conservatives are walking into heavy traffic, into the sea, off of cliffs and high buildings, and killing or injuring themselves in bizarre mass suicides from copycat drug ingestion to group shootings.

Law enforcement agencies in all fifty states are urging citizens to be on the lookout for the large numbers of the radio host's listeners wandering the streets of America, trying to take their own lives by any means available.

"Obviously anyone who looks or behaves like a zombie is to be considered a Rush Limbaugh fan, but other indications are a blank stare, profuse drooling and speaking in gibberish", said Sergeant David Scroggins of the Houston Police Dept.

Hundreds of bodies of dead and rotting dittoheads clutter the streets around the various radio studios across the country from which the deceased entertainer's radio show was broadcast, and more are stumbling to the scenes in various stages of catatonia, leaving traffic at a standstill and overwhelming the makeshift morgues popping up along the streets. "I haven't seen anything like this since those Jim Jones cultists drank the Kool-Aid," said HPD Captain Leon Jones.

Funeral services pending at this time, but preparations are being made to dig the largest grave in history to inter Limbaugh near one of his favorite places, the parking lot of the Denny's in Palm Beach, Florida where he was rumored to have acquired the drugs that took his life from his former housekeeper.

Notable deceased fans who have been identified to date include former Texas congressman Dick Armey, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, and former White House staffer Mary Matalin.

===============

Too bad it's just satire, isn't it?

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

John Updike 1932 - 2009

Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of America in the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.

Mr. Updike’s four keenly observed Rabbit novels (“Rabbit, Run,” 1960; “Rabbit Redux,” 1971; “Rabbit Is Rich,” 1981; and “Rabbit at Rest,” 1990) chronicled the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom — high school basketball star turned car salesman, householder and errant husband — and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (from feminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled his cozy nest. Harry, who self-importantly compared his own fall from grace to this country’s waning power on the global stage, his business woes to the national deficit, was both a representative American of his generation and a kind of scientific specimen — an index to the human species and its propensity for doubt and narcissism and self immolation.


He wrote about the mundane, and underneath his pen it became spectacular.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

His essays and criticism alone filled more than a dozen volumes, and ranged from “Golf Dreams: Writings on Art” (1996) to “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989) and “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) to “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989) to his famous piece on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker on Oct. 22, 1960.

While his vast output of poetry tended toward light verse, in “Midpoint and Other Poems” (1969), the title work undertakes a self-examination at age 35, comically combining a homage to past great poets, autobiography and experimental typography in what the author called “a joke on the antique genre of the long poem.”

The poem concludes:

Born laughing, I’ve believed in the absurd,
Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,
I must impersonate a serious man.


As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s prose grew leaner and more muscular, and his novels waxed more exotic in form, locale and subject matter, especially in “The Coup” (1978), set in an imaginary African country; “Brazil” (1994), a venture in magic realism; “Toward the End of Time” (1997), whose story occurs in 2020, following a war between the United States and China; “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000), about Hamlet’s mother and uncle, and “The Terrorist” (2006), a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

Godspeed to one of the great American authors.

The demise of Jared Woodfill (?) *update*

Perhaps exaggeration, but Alan Bernstein passes it along anyway:

Smarting over their party's losses in the November election in Harris County, some local Republican precinct chairmen are poised to try to restructure party leadership, effectively deposing party chairman Jared Woodfill -- tonight.

Precinct leaders meet at 7 p.m. at the Houston Community College campus on the West Loop, and the show is free and open to the public.

Restive GOPers will try to get the assemblage to create a seven-member steering committee to set a new course for the party and then yield to whomever is elected party chairman in the county's March 2010 primary.

They allege that under Woodfill, the party failed to coordinate effectively with like-minded folks in adjacent counties, to raise enough money to run party operations, to recruit enough candidates for public office and to expand the party's voter base, among other things.

Woodfill has been preaching some of the same goals: expand the party's appeal to new voters; use new technologies to spread the word. But he's the one who was in charge when the party lost two-dozen judgeships and other local seats in November in the face of a Democratic vote wave that was generated by President Obama's candidacy, scandals involving local GOP officials (as depicted here by Democrats) and other factors.


I'll believe it when I read about it, Alan. And I'm standing by ready to update the news here when you report it.

Update: Kevin Whited, in the comments to the above, links a Twit who reported that Woodfill repelled the overthrow attempt. Alan followed shortly after with this:

The Rev. Gene Pack prayed at the start of tonight's 7 o'clock Harris County Republican leadership meeting for blessings upon party chairman Jared Woodfill "in these times of rebellion."

When the meeting was adjourned after 9:30, Woodfill's critics hadn't even tried to introduce a resolution that .. would have essentially taken away much of his authority.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Pre-Super Week Wrangle

It's the first Monday of the new Obama Administration, and that means it's time for another edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance Weekly Round-Up.

Would you like a Cheeseburger in Paradise made from Texas Black Angus raised on drilling waste? Get yours at Bluedaze: Drilling Reform for Texas. Served up by TXsharon.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why John Cornyn is dropping poo in our collective punch bowl. Why be reasonable when you can be a Republican?

WhosPlayin was glued to the TV all day Tuesday, popping the cork on champagne at 11 AM. But ultimately there were more important things.

jobsanger thinks it was wrong for federal and state representatives to threaten the El Paso city council with cutting off state and federal funds if they passed a resolution asking the government to reconsider the failed "war on drugs" in Legislators Threaten El Paso Council.

At McBlogger, we're all about things that make your taco go POP!

Off the Kuff commented on the actions of the State Board of Education in which efforts by religious conservatives to weaken science education were (mostly) thwarted.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston has posted how much money Bob Perry has donated in 2008.

Gay divorce comes to Texas once again, forcing the hand of the judicial system to do what is right in civil law. The Texas Cloverleaf examines the case in Dallas.

Neil at Texas Liberal inquires about Barack Obama's urban policy.

The Texas Congressional GOP delegation is still voting to deny poor children their health insurance, and John Cornyn continues acting like a massive bleeding hemorrhoid. It's just a gambit to establish himself as the conservative foil to President Obama, and perhaps presage a White House bid of his own in 2012. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has the bloody details.

BossKitty at TruthHugger illustrates how Homeland Security can justify any risk. All euphemisms aside, taking the most lethal pathogens in the US arsenal into America's heartland and breadbasket seems suicidal. Plum Island to Manhattan - Pathogens On The Move. Instead of taking researchers to the lethal experiment, they are placing the experiment among us.

Burnt Orange Report formalizes and announces its Right to Respond Policy.

Though the Three Wise Men have been as critical of Israel's actions in Gaza as anyone, we're as quick to point out -- as historian Mark LeVine makes clear -- that Hamas' embrace of violence hasn't exactly helped the cause of Palestinian self-determination either.

Vince from Capitol Annex takes a look at Houston mayor Bill White's campaign finance reports and notes that White is spending money from his municipal campaign account on his race for U.S. Senate.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

A sad report on Galveston and Chambers County

From Bill King, in an e-mail entitled "Driving Bolivar":

=====================

... Currently, there are about 38 persons confirmed to have been killed by the Hurricane Ike with about 40 others still missing. The governor's office estimates the total economic impact of Hurricanes Ike and Dolly to be a staggering $29 billion. To put this in perspective, it is $4 billion more than the automakers' proposed bailout.

We also went on a bus tour of some of the damage, including a stop at UTMB. (Click here for a video clip). The physical damage is extensive, but the economic impact is overwhelming. On the Strand, we passed business after business that were still boarded up. The City of Galveston estimates that is has lost almost a third of its pre-Ike population of 57,000. UTMB, the island's largest employer has cut its workforce from 12,500 before Ike to 10,000. It will clearly take years for Galveston to recover from Hurricane Ike, a process that is being further handicapped by the larger economic woes.

One of the more intriguing issues discussed during the day was the so-called Ike Dike. This is a proposal to extend the existing Galveston seawall from High Island to Freeport. Preliminary costs are estimated at around $4 billion, which is a lot of money, but when compared to $29 billion in damages it looks like a bargain. My friends in the environmental community are greatly concerned about the environmental impact of such a project and rightly so. However, hurricanes also do a great deal of environmental damage to the bay system. In any event, it will be fascinating to follow this issue.

After the commission meeting I decided to drive back to Houston through Chambers County and see Ike's impact on Bolivar peninsula for myself. During the day, county judge Jim Yarbrough had shared with us that approximately 80% of Bolivar's 5,300 structures had been destroyed and showed a number of aerial photographs of the damages. However, that briefing did not prepare me for what I saw. The extent of the devastation can not be truly appreciated without seeing it personally.

On exiting the ferry, the signs of damage are immediately obvious. But on that far west end, many structures survived. As you drive farther east the extent of the damage worsens. By Gilchrist, which is a little over half way to High Island, it is nearly complete devastation. I counted only eight houses still standing in Gilchrist.

Before Hurricane Ike, Rollover Pass (which is the only waterway between the Gulf and East Bay and located in Gilchrist) was a hub of activity on the Bolivar Peninsula. It was a favorite of fishermen with a number of bait camps, docks and "joints." When I crossed the bridge at Rollover Pass on Friday there was nothing left. In fact, there was hardly any sign that there had ever been anything there.

The one encouraging note I have to offer is that in both Galveston and on Bolivar the newer buildings that had been constructed to more rigid building codes appeared to have survived the storm with relatively little damage. All of the homes that survived near Gilchrist were newer structures.

As I turned north into Chambers County I saw about a dozen plumes of black smoke on the horizon. Earlier in the day, County officials had described a bureaucratic dilemma that accounted for these plumes. FEMA will not reimburse local governments for removing debris from private property. If the property owner can push the debris on his/her property to the public right-of-way, FEMA will pay for the removal. The problem is that in Chambers County ranchers and farmers have debris fields that go on for miles. Just moving the debris to a public right-of-way would bankrupt these folks. One official told us that he expected to see a good deal of "accidental" fires. And there they were.

As you can easily imagine, burning the debris is not helpful with our air quality problems. Much of the debris fields are made up of "treated timber." Burning treated timber is particularly problematic. Once again, our government agencies are working at cross purposes . . . FEMA imposing a moronic rule to save an insignificant sum of money and the EPA beating us over the head and shoulders about our air quality.

As I turned back to Houston, my thoughts were on the 40-80 souls lost in the storm. Most have lived, and died, within a few hundred feet of the route I had just driven. The recovery challenges facing this community are daunting, but they will be overcome. The loss of these individuals was, for the most part, avoidable. It is always difficult to understand why some people stay in harm's way notwithstanding the warnings available today.

When preparing this blog entry, I checked the list of those persons still missing from the storm maintained by The Laura Recovery Center. There photos and some personal information posted on eight victims. Several were elderly. As I was looking at the faces of these individuals I began to get a sick feeling in my stomach, wondering if they stayed voluntarily or if they had simply been unable to evacuate themselves.

The state of the GOP in Texas

The last frontier of ignorance and meanness in the country:

With President Barack Obama a strong supporter (of SCHIP) and bipartisan Senate support precluding the possibility of a filibuster, many GOP members of Congress who had previously opposed the program joined the majority. ... No such rethinking of previous partisan positions was evident in the Texas delegation, where 20 Republicans voted against the SCHIP bill. The state leads the nation in percentage of uninsured children, with Harris County having the largest rate of unprotected youngsters.

That’s why the continuing opposition of Houston-region GOP representatives John Culberson, Pete Olson, Kevin Brady, Michael McCaul, Ted Poe and Ron Paul is so unfathomable. The Southeast Texas medical safety net is already stretched to breaking by the burden of treating uninsured patients in overcrowded hospital emergency rooms and absorbing the costs of their care.

In opposing SCHIP on the grounds it is socialized medicine, too costly and subsidizes illegal alien health care, the lawmakers are ignoring this fact: Taxpayers already bear the cost of treatment for the uninsured. Every child covered by the state-supplied private policies is one less expense for area health care providers, who otherwise pass the cost of indigent care on to insured patients.


Maybe they're taking advanced asshole lessons from John Cornyn:


“I think he has decided that the only chance Republicans have is to be very aggressive,” political scientist Larry Sabato said of the Texan, who
came to Washington six years ago as a defender of President George W. Bush.

Don't you wish he was half as aggressive about his dental hygiene?

New York Gov. David Paterson, who appointed Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand as Clinton’s successor, called Cornyn’s maneuvering “grandstanding and self-promotion.”

And some Republican Senate colleagues want less partisanship and more collaboration. As Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., put it: “The message that the American people are sending us now is that they want us to work together and get to work.”

...

And Cornyn pointedly challenged Reid about alleged ties to lobbyists. A Reid spokesman dismissed the criticism by Cornyn as having “everything to do with raising money.”

The article goes on to acknowledge Cornhole's White House aspirations, perhaps as early as 2012.

Bring. It. On.