What Change looks like *with updates*

I just want to underscore a few of the points made here:

When the nation watched horrified while the Department of Homeland Security fumbled painfully in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Michael Chertoff blamed it on phantom headlines, George Bush assured Brownie he was 'doing a heckuva job,' and right-wing pundits eagerly acquitted the White House by trying to lay the whole mess at the feet of the victims and any Democrat within 1000 miles of Louisiana. When George Bush and his merry band of neoclowns stampeded a panicked nation into an ill-conceived war against Iraq and rolled snake-eyes on catching bin Laden it was all because of 'bad intel' and blown all out of proportion by biased, 'liberal reporters' feeding the progressive pathology of 'Bush Derangement Syndrome.'

On and on it went, like a runaway freight train. The economic meltdown was brought on by the unbridled greed of middle class wage earners who bought homes with their 650 FICO scores; politicization of the Justice Department was an artifact of an overzealous congressional witch hunt; Sarah Palin was a superbly qualified candidate unfairly slimed by savage bloggers. If excuses were assholes, the conservative beast would be studded with ugly sphincters oozing an endless stream of foul bullshit from head to toe.

I'd prefer a President who is flawless. But after eight years of conservative 'blame-gaming,' endless Republican evasion and stonewalling, and crazed wingnut finger pointing, I'll settle for one that can construct coherent sentences and tell the truth at the same time. I'll happily support a President with enough basic respect for We the People to look us in the eye and own up.

We'd almost forgotten what honesty looks like. It looks like change.

Update: I'm just not as big a man as Obama. I'd rather kick these morons in the balls until they start to understand the very simple truths more calmly explained in this post:

The Republican playbook is about standing in opposition, knowing full well that the Democratic Congress is going to pass a stimulus package. Their next step is to go home and sell to what's left of their constituencies the notion that if we had listened to them, things would be far rosier. As a minority, a control group is unlikely to emerge that can disprove false numbers based on false rhetoric. They can go back and campaign in two years whether or not Obama's plan creates anywhere close to the number he hopes and tell the world, and claim that their plan would have provided double the number.

A perfectly manipulative strategy which plays to the short-term memory of the American electorate.

The minority role in government should be about balancing the need of their constituencies with real ideas that create a stronger way of finding a solution. In the modern era of politics Rush Limbaugh style, it is all about spewing hate and misinformation in the guise of governing for the good of the people. The very people that the Obama plan will help most, are the very same people that are being preached to by the likes of Limbaugh and his puppets in Congress.

As far as I'm concerned, though ... fuck 'em.

Update II: Go Fuck Yourself, Dick.

Update III:

What have we seen the last few weeks? Democrats caving to GOP demands and inserting useless tax cut provisions to appease them. Then they vote en masse against the stimulus in the House. Meanwhile, Obama hands yet another cabinet post to yet another Republican, this one a right-wing small-government ideologue who voted to eliminate the Commerce Department he will now head just a few short years ago. Then he gives a schizophrenic acceptance speech where he thanks New Hampshire's governor for caving to his demands for a GOP replacement for his seat, while at the same time arguing that it's time to get past "partisanship". Oh, then he punches Obama in the face by denying him a critical cloture vote on the Senate version of the stimulus bill.

So what the heck, HHS has an opening, and the media establishment is piling on with progressively crazier ideas, because what the heck, in this post-partisan environment, the party that won doesn't get the spoils. So Romney to HHS! Or maybe Gingrich!

During the Bush years, the best interests of our country took a back seat to the GOP's failed ideology. Right now, it looks like the best interests of our country are taking a back seat to the failed ideology of "bipartisanship".

I'm sharpening my boot tips, because somebody is going to have to do some asskicking ...

Annise Parker for Houston

AnniseParker.com

Hangover Wrangle

Did your team win? Did you overdo it at the party? Get back to work now (for those of us who still have a job to go to, that is). And if you get a break today, check out the best of last week's posts from the blogs of the Texas Progressive Alliance.

In her first ever YouTube video, TXsharon shows the emissions boiling into the air when a Barnett Shale gas well undergoes hydraulic fracture.

jobsanger examines the modern Republicans who call themselves conservatives, but have betrayed the beliefs and philosophical standards of past conservatives in Where Are The Real Conservatives?

Nat-Wu at Three Wise Men has something to say about the student loan mess that's making it impossible for many young adults to attend college these days.

The Texas Cloverleaf shows that pictures can tell a thousand words. And the pictures of ships at anchor in Singapore is telling the world we are screwed.

Burnt Orange Report discusses the over 22,000 voters being purged from the Hidalgo County voter rolls.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme explains how the Republican free market principles work in real life using contaminated peanut butter as exhibit A.

Redistricting isn't just a state issue. Houston is under pressure to redraw its city council lines. Off the Kuff takes a look at where this stands.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is amazed at the social progress creeping around the world. America elects a biracial president. Iceland appoints an lesbian prime minister. What's next? Yes We Can - Iceland Courageous.

Easter Lemming Liberal News writes his congressman while considering the Republican death spiral.

WhosPlayin announced 46,000 layoffs this past week -- just in the blogging industry.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out John Carter's latest shenanigans in Carter's political ploy, the "Rangel Rule".

Things can get pretty ugly between fans of competing sports franchises and we at McBlogger were not immune as Cap'n Kroc and Harry Balczak tear each other apart.

Over at Texas Kaos, Libby Shaw's keeping an eye on Senator Jackass of Texas as he tries to heighten his national profile at the expense of American families. in his latest hit, the buckskin fringed one votes against children having health care. Again.

The Republicans are having an identity crisis, and the election of Michael Steele as RNC chair is not likely to help them solve it. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs observes that Rush Limbaugh is still calling the shots, and they are all cheap.

Neil at Texas Liberal offers some thoughts on city elections in Houston.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston publishes what Rick Perry really said at his campaign kickoff speech in the Capitol.

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.

Sunday Funnies

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.

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?

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.