Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

How soon he forgets:

When asked to judge the Bush administration this morning during an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said “history will judge that” but then immediately began making an attempt to distance himself from President Bush. One area of “disagreement” McCain cited was torture:

McCAIN: I obviously don’t want to torture any prisoners. There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on –

WALLACE: You’re not suggesting he did want to torture prisoners.

McCAIN: Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration and, according to published reports, was used. But the point
is, we’ve had our disagreements.

[snip]

McCain seems to forget that he voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding. In fact, when the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. Thus, McCain’s claim that he “obviously doesn’t want to torture prisoners” rings hollow. Indeed, because of Bush’s veto, the CIA retains the option of waterboarding
prisoners...

Amazing how easily he forgets inconvenient little facts like, oh, you know, cheerleading for torture. Maybe he was confused - Bush calls it "enhanced interrorgation," and I can see where an immature fuckwit might misunderstand what's actually being discussed.

He's also a bit unclear on the concept of supporting the minimum wage:

Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) why he has voted 17 times against raising the federal minimum wage. (Wallace later corrected himself and pointed out it was 19 times, to which McCain dismissively replied, “Well, or 29 or 49, whatever it is.”) McCain initially attempted to wriggle out of answering by talking about tax cuts.

But when pressed again by Wallace, McCain claimed that he opposed the increases only because they were attached to unrelated spending bills:

McCAIN: I’m for the minimum wage increases when they are not attached to other big-spending pork barrel. The practice in Washington is attach a good thing to a bad thing. And that way, then you have to vote yes or no. […]

Well, fair enough. I can almost see voting against the minimum wage increase 19 times because it was attached to odious bills. There's just one problem with that explanation:

Ironically, one of the only times McCain actually did support a minimum wage increase was when it was tied to a war funding bill. But on at least 15 occasions, McCain has opposed minimum wage increases that were stand-alone amendments or bills. On April 7, 2000, he even voted against a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution “concerning an increase in the Federal minimum wage.”

Heh heh heh oops. He should'a played the POW card.

McCain seems to be going for the "All lies, all the time" style o' campaign. Sarah Palin's fitting right in there:

The good news is, the McCain campaign is now starting to tell the public about Sarah Palin's accomplishments in Alaska. The bad news is, the principal example of Palin's strength as a leader is a blatant falsehood.

On a couple of the Sunday morning shows, John McCain and his chief surrogates touted Palin's opposition to the now-infamous "bridge to nowhere," a $398 million bridge to connect the town of Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents. To McCain and his supporters, Palin's firm stand against the congressional earmark is compelling evidence of her courage and conviction.

But what McCain and his cohorts are claiming is simply untrue. Palin supported the funding for the project, and kept the federal funds after the bridge deal fell through. Indeed, she ran for governor on a "build-the-bridge platform," and ended up directing federal funds to other wasteful pork projects, for fear of having to return unused tax dollars funds to the federal government.

Perfect match, she is. Lying from Day One, already practiced in abusing power, clueless on foreign policy... he made the right choice for his Veep.

Maybe they think the more outrageous the lies, the more attention won't be drawn away from them and fixed on the monstrous hurricane barrelling down on the Gulf Coast. Poor McCain - his biggest fans are abandoning him to go storm chasing:

Today, GOP officials “announced they would hold only essential party business required under its rules on Monday” at their convention in Minnesota. Party officials “have decided that Monday’s session will open at 3 p.m. Central time and probably end at 5 to 5:30 p.m. and will be limited to official business like adopting the platform and electing convention officers.” The New York Times reports on what the media will be doing:

The major television networks are pulling some of their top talent out of Minneapolis, promising to diminish, if not upend, coverage of the convention. Katie Couric will head to the Gulf Coast to open the “CBS Evening News” from there Monday night, instead of from the convention hall as planned. Charles Gibson of ABC News and Brian Williams of NBC News are expected to do the same.

Yup. Everybody's headed South. Good thing he's decided to head right down there with 'em, eh? Not like he'll be underfoot as authorities desperately scramble to evacuate citizens and save lives at all. Noper.

Anything for a photo op, huh, John? And all Obama's doing is staying the fuck out of the way, monitoring the situation closely without getting underfoot, and preparing to rally millions of donors and volunteers to help with the disaster once the scope of it's known. He's merely acting presidential, not looking it. Silly him.

Stay safe, New Orleans. St. Johnny's on the way: I'm sure all those camera crews and very serious photo sessions will do loads to help you all survive this.

Sunday Sensational Science

Tangled Banks

Ravenna Park, Seattle, WA

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

-Charles Darwin

I'm about to annihilate you lot with science - The 113th Tangled Bank shall be hosted here in just a few short days - so we're going to take a leisurely walk along the banks, enjoy the glories of the natural world, and explore to our hearts' content by way of getting ourselves warmed up for the event.

The Tangled Bank is ostensibly themed around "the science of the natural world," but like so many other arbitrary divisions in science, the neat categories break down upon further inspection. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and even mathematics aren't really separate from biology and nature science. It's all interconnected - inextricably tangled. That was the thing that attracted me to science, so long ago: discovering that everything is joined, and that any division we see is just an arbitrary convenience, when you get right down to it.

This leads to some entertaining juxtapositions. And it's the excuse I use to study absolutely everything.

Follow me through the Tangled Bank of an SF writer's interests. And then you might want to take the opportunity to wander off all on your own.


Growing up in Arizona, I heard quite a bit about the mytical jackalope. Imagine how excited I was to discover the truth from Thinkevolution.net in Tangled Bank #84!

Shocking photos of an unusual hybrid-type animal confounded biologists today. Images of what zoo-goers agree look an awful lot like a baby jackalope were posted on the internet today, making evidence against the canonical view of evolution by common descent—which thoroughly rejects the existence of jackalopes, which would require the mating of two phylogenetically divergent and anatomically dissimilar organisms—available worldwide. Jackalopes, also known as “antelabbits” or “stagbunnies” according to Wikipedia, had long been rejected as imaginary joke animals that people from the southwest described to gullible roommates when they went away to college in the east. But the late-breaking images challenge all that.

See? We Arizonans weren't having you on at all. And we've still got that beachfront house for sale in Yuma, incidentally. Fantastic ocean views!


As a writer, two of my great loves are art and language. The Scientific Activist reported in Tangled Bank #71 on a project that combined both of those loves with the fight against global warming:

One potentially effective way of tackling these particular issues, then, could be through art: specifically through large in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore, publicly-visible art projects designed to bring the issue to the forefront of the mind of the incidental viewer.

This is precisely the aim of the debut project of the Precipice Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about global warming and environmental issues through public art. The project, entitled "Indestructible Language", is the latest creation of artist Mary Ellen Carroll, and, as you might be able to tell, it could make quite an impression...

Indeed. Art can grab you attention in the way no amount of hand-wringing and dire studies ever could. And that's why artists might end up saving the world.

With the help o' some scientists, o' course. We can't do this all by ourselves.

Not that artists such as meself don't have great big egos large enough to boast such superpowers - we create worlds, for fucks' sake. That's why articles like "Exotic Earths" from Dynamics of Cats, from Tangled Bank #62 , really grab my attention. It's easier to facilitate the willing suspension of disbelief when you can point to science and say, "See? Perfectly plausible. There's lots o' earths. With oceans, even."

More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets, according to a new study by scientists associated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute. Many of these planetsmay be covered in deep global oceans, with abundant potential for life.




There you have it. A Universe crowded with life. So shut up about the impossibility of my farflung space civilizations, already.

Another thing SF writers have to wrestle with is nothing less than the very structure of space-time itself. We've got to come up with somewhat reasonable ways for Bob the Bug-eyed Alien to get from Point A to Point B without spending generations doing it. And so it's a little depressing when articles like "Building Space-Time" come along from Stochastic Scribbles in Tangled Bank #108 and throw cold water all over our FTL parade:

The July issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on how our four-dimensional space-time could arise from basic building blocks that self-organize in a quantum superposition. Their approach, called causal dynamical triangulations, is an extension of Euclidean quantum gravity. But instead of just seeing what a superposition of self-organized building blocks that assemble arbitrarily looks like, which turns out to be a bunched up and very messy space-time with plain Euclidean quantum gravity, they imposed causality on each building block so that they can only assemble in specific ways. Their computer simulations show that the result would be a space-time that looks much like our own on large scales.

[snip]

And if the theory is correct, then the built-in causality would imply that wormholes and time travel would not be possible. While it's cool that ordinary space-time could be built from first principles, it would be a bummer in that faster-than-light travel or direct observation of historical events would not be possible.

D'oh, shit.

Well. Maybe if the buggers have big enough brains, they'll figure out something clever. And speaking of brains... I remember being told as a child that when you stopped growing, the brain you had was It. Lose brain cells, and they're lost forever. It wasn't until I started researching neurology years later that I got the good news: we may grow new neurons after all. Sharp Brains had the latest on that for Tangled Bank #104:

In the last few years, researchers have discovered that new nerve cells (neurons) are born, presumably from residual stem cells that exist even in adults. That should be good news for all of us as we get older and fear mental decline. The bad news is that these new neurons die, unless our minds are active enough.

[snip]

A critical window of time determines whether or not the new neurons survive. In an experimental test of this time window, mice were housed for one week in an environmentally rich environment (toys, activity wheels, etc.), or for controls in regular cages, beginning one week after injection with a new-neuron DNA-synthesis marker. Results showed that lasting increase was restricted to new neurons that appeared between one and three weeks before living in an enriched environment. This corresponds to the time when new neurons are extending their neurons in search of targets and their dendrites are developing synaptic contacts to the neurotransmitters normally used in the hippocampus. The new neurons that developed during this time window survived up to the four months of monitoring, even when removed the enriched environment.

Ooo, before too much longer, I may be able to grow myself a better brain and keep it. That's not just good for my characters, that's good for me!

So many delights within the Tangled Bank, so little time. I haven't even been able to touch on Salto Sobrius's Tangled Bank #68 article on the Antikythera mechanism, which fascinated me as a child and may have led to my adoration of all things ancient Greek. I haven't shared with you The Digital Cuttlefish's delightful poem on the genetics of the spork from Tangled Bank #105, or PZ's eminently useful explanation of historical contingency in the evolution of E-coli from Tangled Bank #107. I couldn't even begin to delight you with genetic expression as explored by Tangled Up In Blue Guy in Tangled Bank #106.

So it goes.

I'll leave you instead with this fragment of poetry from Denialism Blog's beautiful Tangled Bank #111 edition. Says it all, really:

You can't go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
It's part of nature too.

Roadside Waterfall, Mount Rainier, Washington

If you have something science-related you'd like to submit for Tangled Bank #113, get it in to pzmyers@gmail.com by September 2nd. Or you'll really wish you had.

As always, click on the pictures for their source. Except in the cases of those with actual captions, which are Dana Hunter originals. Are you impressed? I'm impressed. I'm a decent writer, but a piss-poor photographer, which makes these all the more special for being very nearly good.

The Most Dangerous Politician Ever

No, it's not McCain. Or Palin. 'Tis Obama, and he's dangerous because of a speech.

Obama's acceptance speech Thursday night was indeed phenomenal, but I hadn't thought of it as dangerous until I read Kevin Drum's take:

Tonight Obama made a start on a campaign that's based not just on talking points (though there will be plenty of those), but on a sustained assault on modern conservatism and a sustained defense of modern liberalism.

But it was only a start. He needs to keep pressing both halves of that game plan, even if it means occasionally saying some hard things. If he takes a few chances and does that, though, he'll not only win, he'll win with a public behind him that's actively sold on a genuinely liberal agenda. This is why conservatives have so far been apoplectic about his speech tonight: if he continues down this road, and wins, they know that he'll leave movement conservatism in tatters. He is, at least potentially, the most dangerous politician they've ever faced. [emphasis added]

*blink*

Wow.

Damn.

Really?

Fuck yes!

The more I see of this man, the more I see the Democratic Party falling in behind him, the more I see even Republicans stepping up to join him, the more I start to believe Kevin's right. I've never heard people speak of a politician this way. Not this full-throated roar of acclamation. Not this thrill. Not to this degree.

Throughout history, a rare handful of human beings have inspired people to rise up, to envision a better world and then throw everything they have into building it. I think Obama's that man for our era. I don't know for sure yet - won't know until I've seen him govern. But the enthusiasm, the sense of renewal, tell me that he's got the potential to be someone very special indeed.

Dr. King was such a man. JFK was such a man. FDR was such a man. Our Founding Fathers were such men.

Every day, it seems increasingly more likely Obama is such a man.

No wonder the Republicons are shit-scared and throwing out every smear they can manufacture. No wonder they had to present a shiny gimmick as McCain's VP pick. No wonder they're terrified.

Well they should be.

"The most dangerous politician they've ever faced."

What a ring that has!

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Yes, Happy Hour's late today. I've had to wade through ten metric tons of Sara Palin bullshit to get to the actual news. I'd hoped the shine would've worn off by now, but no such luck.

She's a fucking disaster. She's a cynical political ploy. She's a shiny object thrown on the tracks to derail us. Can we just fucking move on now?

Let's talk about the RNC and the flourishing police state:

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Denver had its bad moments when the police forgot who they're actually meant to "protect and serve" part and started shoving reporters out in the street so they could then arrest them for obstructing traffic, but we saw nothing quite like this. There seems to be a qualitative difference between the way Democratic conventions handle security and the way Republicon conventions do. Dems don't let police agencies too far off the leash. Rethugs, on the other hand, are more than happy to let the dogs loose:

When word first hit about the raids committed by uniformed officers against various sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul, it was really bizarre and confusing. Why were the cops staging raids against people like Food Not Bombs? Why did they shut down the RNC Convergence Center and take all their computer gear? What the hell were Ramsey County sheriff's department people doing invading houses in Hennepin-fricking-County?

That last question, as it turns out, helps to answer some of the others.

Bob Fletcher is the sheriff of Ramsey County. Bob Fletcher is a Republican from the formerly lily-white St. Paul suburb of Maplewood, which has for decades had an uneasy relationship with its southern neighbor. Bob Fletcher is also on the verge of losing his job, as a long-standing FBI corruption probe that has already taken out two of his buddies is drawing its net around him; he may well feel that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using extralegal methods to please his RNC pals.

Maybe he's hoping that if he silences enough dirty hippies, his grateful buddies the Rethuglicons will muzzle the FBI. Just saying.

So, we've got police brutality and extralegal raids. What else isn't new in the Bush regime? Let's see what's hiding behind Shiny Object Palin:

But more importantly, critical and substantive things are going on that we need to be paying attention to. Eric Lichtblau in the NYT reminds us of a huge one this morning:

Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.
...
The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.
...
The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics. (Emphasis added)

In all the flurry and bustle of the conventions and Palin, not to mention back to school and Labor Day weekend for the nation, this could be lost in the flow. It must not be. This provision has all the potential implications, problems, and potential for abuse that the Authorization For Military Force (AUMF) had in 2001. And with a Cheney/Bush Administration still in power, and with their known predilection for abuse, this simply cannot be allowed.

This is but another callous and cynical play by the Administration to manipulate timing and political posture for craven gain. Cheney, Bush and the GOP enablers are going to parry this against the Democrats during election season and try to fearmonger them into approving it.

Joyous. Another Bush play for power, one guaranteed to be parlayed into "Dems are weak on national security!" b.s. Just in time to help John "Hey Ladies, My Runningmate Has a Vagina!" McLame overcome his spectacular lack of sense, sanity and reason, and steal the election with the help of fear and election fraud. What a coinky-dink.

See why I'm saying Palin is too expensive a distraction to focus on? They'll use her novelty to sneak shite like this through, and once it's done, there's no a godsdamned thing we can do about it. The time to raise a stink is now. Before that shit gets passed. Before it's far too late and we've let the Republicons get their hands on a sapping tool. Let your congresscritter know we expect them to stiffen their knees this time.

Is there any sign of hope amidst the endless fuckery? A glimmer. Just that, but it's put a sparkle in my eye today:

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted a focus group in the swing state of Nevada with undecided voters or weak supporters of either candidate who watched Sen. Barack Obama's speech last night.

Key findings:

After viewing the speech, more than 1-in-4 of these swing voters moved from undecided to supporting Barack Obama or from supporting John McCain to undecided.

That's gold, that is. The more people we can siphon off from McCain, the better. I think I've got my father convinced: he knows that if he votes for McCain, I'll never speak to him again, and he doesn't love McCain more than he loves me. It's great if we win folks for Obama. It's fine if we just convince McCain supporters to sit this one out. Tell your conservative friends and family who might be fence-sitting: watch Obama's speech, and if that doesn't sway you, then at the very least just don't fucking vote for McCain.

Enough of us voting Obama will ensure that even voter suppression and hinky Diebold machines can't win this one for the Republicons. Not that they won't be trying, especially in Florida, where open season on voters is off to a rousing start:

Republicans still run the state, so if there are any "discrepancies" in November, they will have the levers of power. Again:

Florida often is the butt of election jokes, and Indian River County unknowingly played a contributing role Tuesday when the Supervisor of Elections reported 5,189 more votes than were actually cast.

It doesn't exactly instill confidence in the system.

No fucking shit, Sherlock.

And if you want something that'll really curl your hair (right before it falls out from the stress), go have a gander at the other article Digby links after the one by Captain Obvious. If you've ever wanted to know, exactly, how far Republicons will go to win, you'll get your answer there.

20,763 dead American soldiers is the number that struck me. I'm sure they counted it a small enough price for victory. It certainly hasn't changed their behavior.

If you forget everything else, remember one thing: these are the cons who will sell you all the snake oil you'll buy. They're the ones who think they can completely redefine reality. There are the raving fucking hypocrites like Rove, whose criticism of Dems is praise of Republicons:

Earlier this month, Karl Rove repeatedly argued that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) would not be “capable” of being Vice President. He complained that “he’s been a governor for three years” and said Kaine was mayor of only the “the 105th largest city in America,” referring to Kaine’s tenure as mayor of Richmond, VA. “It’s not a big town,” he quipped.

Yesterday, however, Rove argued just the opposite with regard to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R). He explained on Fox News that Palin was a good choice as McCain’s vice presidential nominee because she was “mayor of the second largest city in Alaska...”

Not. Even. Close. Karl.

But little things like facts don't stop him. One of the smallest towns in Alaska will now be the second largest, Richmond's demoted to Podunksville, Buttfuckofnowhere County, VA, and being a mayor is no accomplishment unless you're Sara Palin, in which case it makes you total VP material.

Oh, and while the people of New Orleans flee Gustav, capitalize on their misery. Natch.

America: consider yourself warned. If you vote these outrageous fucktards into office yet again, I will never, ever speak to you again as long as I live.

Carnival of the Elitist Bastards IV

The fourth sailing of the HMS Elitist Bastard is now underway with the incomparable Captain Blake Stacey at the helm.

I'm not going to give away what he's done. Just go. Read. Admire!

Ames Takes Down Palin

I don't know how he does it. Full-time job, beautifully-written and reasoned blog, and now: attack ads.



This is exactly the kind of ad I've been hoping the Dems will run: a sledgehammer to the nads using nothing but the truth. And a good dose of snark. Ames and his girlfriend Andrea put the professionals to shame.

Brilliant!

POW Week Concludes

My darlings, you've stuck with me through a solid week of harping on Johnny "Don't Blame Me - I was a POW!" McCain's fuckery. By now, we should all be heartily sick of his bleating. Of course, t'ain't hardly over - there's a long election season ahead, and plenty of opportunities for Johnny to pull out his battered and grubby POW card. I, for one, am waiting for him to start waving it around in defense of his choice of Palin for Veep.

But enough of the bashing. He's done his best to turn his status into a joke, and I can think of no better way to end this parade of pathos by obliging him. Let's have us some fun.

Courtesy of Jared Rea, let's play the POW Game!




Digby's Hullaballoo guestblogger Batocchio brings us John McCain POW Bingo!






And finally, Canadian Cynic found a video that says it all, really.

"Into the Valley of Death Rode the" 600th Post

I'll take "Excuses to Yammer about Tennyson" for $1000, Alex.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of my favorite poets growing up. I got introduced to him, no shit, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Pioneers on the American prairie read England's Poet Laureate. How awesome is that? Until I branched out and really got addicted to ancient and Eastern poets, he was Teh Master as far as I was concerned. Well, at times, Robert Burns edged him out, but only just.

I didn't know how to read poetry back then, so I always read "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in a sort of nostalgic, lilting, mournful tone. I remember being annoyed at the high school English teacher who taught me how it was actually supposed to be read: with a martial, heroic tone, like a thunderous charge. "Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred."

Well, shit. There went my emo interpretation.

I was always amused by the "Oops" factor of this poem. If some absolute idiot hadn't botched orders, and some other absolute idiot not blindly followed them, there would've been no heroic but doomed charge, and no poem. It was one of my first introductions to the importance of questioning authority. My future liberal and rationalist tendencies might have been predicted by the fact that I never could figure out why a grand and stirring poem was written in praise of a bunch of goobers who damned well should have reasoned why, and further, should have presaged Shaggy by saying, "Great plan, Lord Raglan. There's just one problem - we ain't doing it."

Still. No one can deny that out of a total debacle came one of the greatest poems in the English language. And so, I use the excuse of my 600th post to present it for your reading pleasure.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892)

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre-stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred

May My Books Burn

I'm usually mightily offended when ignorant fuckwits burn books. The world has lost countless irreplacable manuscripts because some rabid religious freaks got it into their heads that either some or all books are intolerably wicked and must suffer the same fate as witches, heretics, and scientists.

It makes me sick when I think of Christians burning the library at Alexandria. One of the greatest repositories of learning in the ancient world reduced to ashes, all for the sake of some podunk tribal god from Israel with delusions of grandeur and an allergy to education.

It outrages me to look over the horribly long list of notable book burnings at Wikipedia, and realize this reflects only a fraction of the destruction.

I can't stand the raving dumbasses who would destroy what they don't understand.

So you might be surprised to learn that I was delighted when J.K. Rowling's books were consigned to the pyre. (I know, I know - which time, right?) I'll tell you what I was thinking: for one thing, the burners were proving just how insane fundamentalist religion is, and for another, they had to buy the books.

I love the fact they have to shell out money to the author to indulge in their little fits.

That's why I giggled again when Dispatches from the Culture Wars announced yet another Rowling roast. Rowling has sold - let me consult teh Google - ah, yes, nearly half a million billion books by now. My outrage meter only hits the red when something irreplacable is burned by religious frothers. I don't think they're going to manage half a million any time soon. Harry Potter will be passed down to posterity, and all will be well.

Not to mention, it got me to thinking...

What can I do to ensure my books are also burned?

Book sales. Free publicity. Proof that I'm hated by all the right people.

This would be fantastic.

Now mind you, it saddens me that we live in a society where people think that burning books is a fine idea, and where a sizable minority of the population is this ignorant and intolerant. That's bad. But since they're here, and since we haven't figured out a way to rid ourselves of them, we might as well milk them for all they're worth.

So here's a thought: perhaps I should offer bulk discounts for fundies who want to make an example of my immortal prose. I could send out fliers with helpful bullet points (and lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and FONT SIZE CHANGES and PRETTY COLORS!!1!1!!) enumerating everything evil in my novels. I should probably set up a website with nifty little tools for planning a book burning and helpful links to distributors of books, lighter fluid, and marshmallows. I might even go round to churches, wearing little satin devil horns and describing what makes me the Antichrist. I could pay people to wear sandwich boards, hand out leaflets, and phone pastors, urging people to consign this terrible evil to the fire.

For the reasonable price of, oh, say, $19.98 per hardcover, $3.98 per paperback, minimum order of 100 copies.

And if this thing really takes off, consider the tie-ins. Effigies of the author. How-to videos. CDs of cheery songs to sing while the evil books burn. T-shirts. The possibilities are endless.

Should be relatively easy to get fundies to bite. After all, in the very first novel in the series, we've got gay main characters, not to mention godless civilizations and probably a billion other things I haven't identified that are sure to get the fundies foaming.

And just wait until we get to the part of the series set in the modern age and you see what's said about evangelical Christianity. Whoo-boy. Mind you, those bits were written before I became an evil atheist, and indeed many were written before I'd even left the last vestiges of Christianity behind. You can well imagine what it's going to look like now.

Wait till they get a load of the beastiality... heh. I should earn a bonfire for that one.

So yes, I do indeed hope the fundies are offended enough by my books to burn them. Not only will they be contributing to my upkeep, they'll be giving me a baseball bat to beat them with. After all, if I'm well-known enough to be worthy of a book burning, I shall also be famous enough to have people sit up and take note when I give lectures on exactly why book burners should be laughed out of civilization.

And that will give me a warm feeling much akin to standing by a roaring fire on a cold day.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

God to Republicons: "You kids get the hell off my lawn!"

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the Republicans are considering delaying the start of their convention because of Tropical Storm Gustav, which is expected to become a hurricane before making landfall on Tuesday. The White House is also debating whether Bush should cancel his speech or not.

Gustav is not the only problem Mother Nature is throwing at our country. Tropical Storm Hannah is out there strengthening also, and expected to become a hurricane in the next couple of days and could hit the U.S. towards the end of next week.

As if that isn’t enough, there are two more potential storms growing.

Note to theocons: if you're going to claim that God sends down hurricanes to show his wrath regarding teh gays et al, you should probably request he times things better. It just looks kinda bad when all the hurricanes skip the Democratic National Convention week and gang up on Republicons.

Global warming's a bitch, innit?

You may have noticed I didn't lead with McLame's desperate pleas for attention. That's because when you give him that sort of attention, it only encourages him to engage in even more outrageous antics. Like, oh, say, picking a creationist, global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Hillary-bashing, extreme-anti-choice, scandal-plagued, Big-Oil-soaked, foreign-policy-challenged, clueless, inexperienced, and all round ridiculous running mate simply because she goes down easy with theocons and might lure mythical Clinton holdouts with her mighty vagina:

There's a political adage that's been around for a while that says the first "presidential decision" a candidate makes is picking a running mate. If that's the case, John McCain would apparently be a very odd president.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, NBC News has learned.

She would be the first woman ever to serve on a Republican presidential ticket. The pro-life Palin would also be the first Alaskan ever to appear on a national ticket.

Palin, 44, was elected Alaska's first woman governor in 2006.

Every network confirms it; this is the actual Republican ticket for 2008: McCain/Palin.

It's more than surprising; it's the strangest running-mate decision since Dan Quayle. Sarah Palin spent a year working as a commissioner for the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and has been governor for a year and a half. Now, she'll be the Republicans' vice presidential candidate, and if things go well for McCain, one heartbeat from the presidency. When it comes to being untested and unknown, Palin is in a league of her own.

Just yesterday, advisers to the McCain campaign conceded to the New York Times that McCain "thinks highly" of Palin, but "her less than two years in office would undercut one of the McCain campaign's central criticisms of Senator Barack Obama -- that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief." So much for the McCain campaign's message.

Stepping back, we have the man who would be the oldest president in American history, who happens to have a record of health problems, picking a virtual unknown who's been a governor for less than two years. Amazing.

This choice comes down to two things: McCain had to do something to suck the right-wing's dicks, and he wanted to upstage Obama. Country first? Not even fucking close.

McCain's in this for his own power and glory. Like a spoiled brat drama queen, he'll do anything to make sure attention stays focused on him. He doesn't want to lead this country: he wants to become president so he can call himself President and play with all the bestest toys.

This is all we can expect from a campaign that can't even figure out basic English grammar:

They were selling this on their fucking website. You'd think that a bunch of people trying to get a man elected would have the intelligence to proofread their fucking promotional pens.

And what kind of news gets lost in the VP din? Oh, you know, nothing special. Just the deputy of McCain's most favoritest Iraqi getting arrested for bombing Iraqis and Americans:

BAGHDAD — U.S. forces have arrested a deputy of Ahmad Chalabi, who was once the Bush administration's favorite Iraqi politician, and implicated him in bombings that killed Americans and Iraqis, Chalabi and Iraqi government officials said Thursday.

The U.S. military alleged that the arrested official was working with the "highest echelons" of the Iranian "special groups" criminals, referring to what the U.S. military says are Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq.

Ali Faisal al Lami, a Shiite Muslim official and a member of the Sadrist Party who's serving as an executive of the Justice and Accountability Committee, which Chalabi heads, was arrested Wednesday at Baghdad International Airport as he returned from a family vacation in Lebanon, Iraqi officials said. The Justice and Accountability Committee screens former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who are applying for jobs in the government.

That John McCain. He's sure some foreign policy geeneeyus, ain't he?

McCain Doesn't Like to Mention His POW Status and We're Not Sick of Him Doing It. Meanwhile, Back in Reality...

POW Week continues with an exhaustive expose of POW excuse exhaustion.

McCain, in a sad attempt to suck wind from Obama's sails and blow smoke up the right wing's ass, brought up - betcha didn't see this coming - his POW status:

"My opponent had the chance to express such confidence in America, when he delivered a much anticipated address in Berlin. He was the picture of confidence, in some ways. But confidence in oneself and confidence in one's country are not the same. And in that speech, Senator Obama left an important point unclear. He suggested that the end of the Cold War proved that there was, quote, 'no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.' Now I missed a few years of the Cold War, as the guest of one of our adversaries, but as I recall the world was deeply divided during the Cold War -- between the side of freedom and the side of tyranny. The Cold War ended not because the world stood "as one," but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership." [emphasis eye-rollingly added]

There was a little myth going around that said McCain "only reluctantly" brings up his history as a POW. This will become an urban legend on par with alligators in sewers and hooks hanging from car doors.

McCain's never been reluctant to scream "POW!" He did it years ago to snow Arizona voters into thinking he was a man worthy of their affections:

When he first ran for Congress in Arizona nearly three decades ago, John McCain had one clear liability: he wasn't from the state, and he could count the number of years he had lived there on a couple of fingers.

So his primary opponent, state senator Jim Mack, attacked him as a Johnny-come-lately. To counter the charge, at a candidate forum, McCain offered a decidedly pointed response. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things," he said. "As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

Don't this just sound eerily similar to the McCain we know and loathe today? The only difference between then and now is that he wasn't using POW as a panacea for every woe from Abba to zings over his houses.

There are plentiful signs his POW bucket is springing leaks. There's the above TIME magazine article, whose title, "Is McCain Overplaying the POW Card?" speaks volumes. When even conservative-loving TIME decides their bestest hero evah McCain is getting repetitive, you know the magic's worn off.

Rachel Maddow got huge rounds of applause for taking McCain to task. One of his fans is sick to death of his constant yawping. And Jimmy Carter would like McCain to understand that although POW shares two letters with "cow," he should stop fucking milking it:

DENVER — Former president Jimmy Carter called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "distinguished naval officer," but he said the Arizona senator has been "milking every possible drop of advantage" from his time served as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

[snip]

He said he was bewildered by McCain's performance at the Saddleback Presidential Forum hosted by pastor and author Rick Warren in Lake Forest, Calif., earlier this month.

Carter said that whether he was asked about religion, domestic or foreign affairs, every answer came back to McCain's 5½ years as a POW.

"John McCain was able to weave in his experience in a Vietnam prison camp, no matter what the question was," Carter said. "It's much better than talking about how he's changed his total character between being a senator, a kind of a maverick … and his acquiescence in the last few months with every kind of lobbyist pressure that the right-wing Republicans have presented."

All but the most rabid of McCain's MSM fans are starting to get that. McCain doesn't have anything else - no fresh policies, no realistic plan to rescue America, nothing to offer the country except a POW card. "Vote for me - I'm a war hero!"

There are too many voices being raised now, not only in the liberal blogosphere, but in the hallowed, hollowed halls of the MSM, for that card to work much longer. It's never a good idea to run a campaign on victimhood and the sympathy vote. Americans don't like whiners. Sympathy and admiration can turn to outrage all too easily if the hand is overplayed.

I have a feeling McCain's going to be throwing down that trump card at every opportunity next week during the RNC. And I have a feeling that America's going to take a collective look at it for the 10 billionth time, look him in the eye, and give him some straight talk: "So fucking what?"

He has no ace in the hole. And I for one will be thrilled to see Obama lay down the royal flush and rake the pot in.

(Disclaimer: I am no poker player, so that metaphor may be completely fucking wrong. I'll admit that, and play no victim card to excuse my appalling ignorance.)

Friday Favorite Show

Television is, for the most part, supremely overrated. Back in the days before this blog and a roommate, when I could throw on the boob tube and leave it running in the background, I used to avoid the networks like bubonic plague. Coworkers would come in blathering about Survivor and American Idol. It astonished them when I couldn't join the conversation because I'd been watching Hot Rocks (geology), Cosmos (I trust I need not explain), or Dirty Jobs (oh, Mike Rowe, how you made me appreciate my suck-ass job!).

But my passion, virtually my religion, was the one-two punch of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

I'm ashamed to admit that I used to watch Daily Show only because Jon Stewart is cute and funny, that I wished they'd lay off the political crap, and that when Colbert Report first started airing, I wasn't impressed.

Then, in mid-2006, the political stuff started getting really interesting. It started making me angry. I'd known for a long time that Bush was an outrageous fuck-up - even in my apolitical days, one of my friends was too ashamed to admit he'd voted for Bush yet again in 2004 - but the extent of his fuckery hadn't struck me until I saw it played out night after night on The Daily Show.

Then I started understanding Colbert's superb satire.

Then I started getting involved.

Because of those shows, I dragged my sorry arse out of bed early on Election Day in November '06, and voted a straight Democratic ticket. That night at work, my beloved coworkers and I watched the election returns come in, and brought the house down screaming when the Dems swept to victory. It was a huge, powerful moment, made possible because of two fake news shows.

These days, there's no TV in my room, and it's too hard to blog and view at the same time. I'm horrifically pressed for time. But I sneak the occasional moment to catch up on Daily Show and Colbert Report. They're the only shows I'll watch. They're the only shows I'll ever need. And you can thank them for this blog.

Long may they air!

What shows are mustn't-misses for you?

Good News! We're All Insured

So says McCain ball-licker and health-plan guru John Goodman. Daily Kos blogger Texas Tom calls him out:

How's this for another kick to working Americans who are struggling to get by? According to the guy that helped develop McCain's health care plan, no Americans should be considered uninsured.

His logic? Anyone who can get into a hospital emergency room is able to access health care, and therefore shouldn't be considered uninsured. His solution to the health insurance crisis is simply to define the problem away.

The following is from today's Dallas Morning News (bolding is my own):

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

Here's the full article: Texas still leads nation in rate of uninsured residents.

That, in a nutshell, is the Republicon solution to everything: instead of solving the problem, outright ignore it. Fire up those motorized goalposts and floor it until up is down, lose is win, and uninsured is suddenly, magically, totally insured.

I want these fuckwits to get their despicable lying hands off my country now, please.

(This thing took off right after I wrote and saved this post. The McCain camp wants us to believe Goodman isn't theirs, but Talking Points Memo and Think Progress have happily hung him around McCain's neck, and so the hilarity continues.)

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

There's nothing I can add to this:

Yesterday evening, ThinkProgress spoke with Lieut. Gen, Harry Soyster and Ret. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, at a Human Rights First reception honoring retired generals who have spoken out against President Bush’s torture policies. Soyster criticized Bush’s veto of a bill banning the CIA from waterboarding — a veto Sen. John McCain supported. Soyster said one clear standard on torture was needed:

SOYSTER: Our position is, all of us, that we need one standard for the United Sates. And because the Central Intelligence Agency has authorized torture, then Americans are torturing. It doesn’t matter where your paycheck comes from.

I never thought I'd live in an America where our military brass had to rebuke our government over the American use of torture. Almost everything the Bush administration has done outrages me, but this is, hands-down, the worst: that they took America's good name and strong stance against torture, and destroyed it by playing 24.

We should not torture people. At one point, I could say we do not torture. The fact I can no longer say America doesn't torture human beings devastates me. That "one clear standard" Soyster speaks of should be "We do not torture. Ever."

And if you think McCain's the man to lead our foreign policy to new heights, you're right - as long as you're talking about new heights of stupidity and depravity:

In an interview with Time magazine this week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) declared that Iraq “is a peaceful and stable country now.” ThinkProgress spoke with Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Robert Wexler (D-FL) at the Democratic National Convention today, and asked them their response to McCain’s assertion. Wexler was incredulous, declaring, “He’s just dead wrong”:

WEXLER: Sen McCain’s judgment unfortunately has become so mistaken on so many things, and this is yet another example of his apparently not understanding the facts on the ground whatsoever. There still is a totally unacceptable level of killing in Iraq. There has been in effect ethnic cleansing in Iraq where religious groups are totally separated from one another. How he can call Iraq — what did you say he called it?
TP: A peaceful and stable country.

WEXLER: It is the furthest thing from a peaceful and stable country. And I guess if in fact he’s right then why do we have 150,000 troops there? We ought to bring them all home as quickly as possible even under his logic. He’s just dead wrong.

Think Progress has a depressing little list showing just how wrong McCain is. We need a president who understands reality, not another one who thinks reality is optional.

Maybe Americans are finally starting to realize that:

There are competing reports on when, exactly, the McCain campaign is going to announce its running mate, with some rumors the news could
come tonight. (Obama communications chief Dan Pfeiffer sounds skeptical: "If they do it, I will pay all of McCain's mortgages next month.")

McCain is, however, set to roll out his selection at an event in Dayton, Ohio, tomorrow. The good news for Republicans is that the event will probably generate enormous media attention. The bad news, the interest from locals isn't nearly as great.

Barack Obama can fill a 75,000 seat stadium. John McCain, it seems, is having trouble filling a 10,000 seat theater in Dayton. They're giving away free tickets in several states and
plan to bus in supporters. The VP announcement can't be overshadowed by a less-than-capacity crowd.

[snip]

That is kind of embarrassing. It's a major event, in a swing state, in a city in which McCain has been advertising heavily. It's also McCain's 72nd birthday, when one might expect Republicans to come out and express their well-wishes. You'd think the interest in who McCain would pick for his ticket would be intense enough to draw an enormous crowd, but they're having trouble filling a theater.

I hope this means they'll be scrounging for votes come this November to ensure their defeat is merely resounding rather than humiliating.

These fuckwits have no business being in power anymore. I wouldn't even trust them to run a fast food joint, much less a nation.

Vets to McCain: Shut the Fuck Up

POW Week continues with a chorus of vets speaking out against McCain's shameless POW peddling. I'm turning the Smack-o-Matic over to them for the evening.

Our first wielder, Valtin from Daily Kos, isn't a vet, but works closely with them and thus belongs in this lineup:

I have never been tortured. But I have worked clinically with those who have, including U.S. POWs. I can tell you it breaks the mind and the body, the soul and the spirit, in a way that can never be forgotten.

Now John McCain cites his experience as a POW and torture victim as an anodyne to every mildly injurious political attack. While his painful experience as a POW matters in the history of the man, in our nation's history, what matters now is that McCain has betrayed that experience, and the lives of thousands he could both know and not know. In doing so, he also betrayed the ideals of American fair-play and justice, going back to George Washington (who forbid his revolutionary army to engage in torture, even if the British did). As everyone should know, those ideals were not realized fully, and we are still fighting for them today. But McCain has trampled them in the mud.

What follows in regards to McCain's enthusiastic support of torture leaves the Smack-o-Matic steaming. We'll let it cool down a moment before we pass it on to our next wielder. Vets have been burned enough by McCain without us adding to the agony.

Right, then. C76 from Vet Voice - you're up:

To the DNC and Senator Obama:

We all know that John McCain served in Vietnam and that he was a POW. We know it because the McCain camp reminds us of his sacrifice at every available opportunity. He uses it to explain away his fits of rage and the fact that he is so wealthy that he doesn't know how many houses he owns or what kind of car he drives. It's a cheap and easy way to extract himself from trouble, and the senator has shown absolutely no reservations about exploiting his service in an effort to explain away his mistakes. I find it crass that he chooses to use his military service as a crutch and a cudgel, but I suppose that it's his right to whore out his time in prison as he sees fit.

The McCain campaign slogan might as well be "Fuck you: I was a POW." It is their rallying cry and I'm surprised they haven't had it trademarked. Even though it is both boorish and illogical, exploiting McCain's service has allowed him to gain ground on Obama. Because of that fact, the Obama campaign and its surrogates absolutely must stop prefacing their remarks with variants of the phrase "I honor John McCain's military service, but..." [emphasis added]

Daaamn. I especially love the blistering McDonald's-Burger King analogy that follows. I think the Smack-o-Matic's nearly reached the melting point.

Still got a few good whacks in it. Neil Riley from Vet Voice, get your elbow into it:

To the Senior Senator from Arizona:

Apparently you don't read the diaries on Vetvoice. It's OK and I'm not at all surprised. You haven't been listening to the needs and concerns of this country's veterans for sometime now. I am writing you in response to your extremely troubling appearance last night on Jay Leno's program. When questioned on the number of homes you own (or really your wife), you dodged the question and again played the POW card.

[snip]

What does that have to do with the question at hand?

Excellent question. The short answer: absofuckinglutely nothing. And Neil doesn't stop pounding there - he goes on to contrast McCain's POW playing with POWs who kept their honor. Nice one. The Smack-o-Matic is quickly headed for total meltdown.

Brandon Friedman from Vet Voice doesn't even wait for it to cool:

The fact is, John McCain's service during Vietnam was honorable and he sacrificed a great deal. But his service to the country carries no more weight than that of any other POW. Likewise, while McCain has given so much to his country, thousands of veterans--past and present--have given as much or more. In this war alone, thousands of troops have lost limbs, been paralyzed, and been burned beyond recognition. So to see McCain resort to playing the POW card when answering legitimate questions, in my mind, cheapens that experience. And by cheapening his own experience in war, he degrades all of our experiences in war. He turns the horrific incidents we've all seen, touched, smelled, and felt into a lame excuse to earn political points. And it dishonors us all.

Thank you, Brandon. Just chuck the Smack-o-Matic into that ice bath, thank you kindly. I think we've increased global warming by a factor of 6,000 tonight. Holy fucking shit.

These are brave men, good men, and honorable men. McCain might as well be spitting in their faces.

Remember them every time he pulls out his trusty POW card to buy his way out of a gaffe. If he'd treat them with such disrespect, just imagine what he'll do to regular people.

The Best $10 You'll Ever Spend

Campaign for America's Future has the greatest welcome gift evah. This is exactly what Republicons need to find on their pillows when they arrive for their conspiracy Convention:

A few short days from now, conservatives will swagger into the Republican National Convention in Minnesota with one main goal: sweep the conservative disasters of the last eight years under the rug.

They’re banking on a week of free media coverage to regurgitate their revisionist history, shift blame for America’s struggles to progressives, and pitch themselves -- miraculously -- as “best qualified” to fill the hole they’ve dug for eight straight years.

We’ve got a strategy to stop their shoveling, and we need your help to make it happen.

Please contribute $10 to greet conservatives next week -- and Americans watching across the country -- with our new “Thanks for the Memories” TV ad.

I wish I could be there to see the looks on their faces when this leaps from their TV screen. That would be an excellent memory indeed.

Calling on the Computer Gurus

My stepmother's computer could use a diagnosis, if anyone's so inclined:

Seems like I am constantly getting the little grey box stating Microsoft has encountered an error and must shut down, blah, blah. Then my internet window will just disappear. Then if I am not on the internet, no window opened, a “voice” will come over my speakers, some ad. If I open Internet Explorer, I right click to start without add ons. It seems that is the ONLY way I can stay on a site without it closing. I have compressed, de-fragged, removed unnecessary programs, spyswept, and virus scanned constantly and I have no virus’, no spyware that is not quarantined and I am still having problems. I still have 89% space on my computer, so it is not as if that is a problem, but if I have more than 2 applications running, then I have a bubble that shows up that says my virtual memory is low and to close not needed applications. The guys who built my computer state that my Norton Systems works uses a lot of memory when in use but my computer should handle it. What a pain.

'Tis indeed. Any ideas? I wouldn't ordinarily beg like this, but damn it, she can't send me photos of the kitten, and he's growing fast. The situation is critial. This is the last I saw of my baby brudder:




Need more kitteh. Help!

Muchos gracias in advance!

Indeedy

(Tip o' the shot glass to Bay of Fundie)

Bartenders: Dems Kick Republicon Ass

From the annals of totally useless but thoroughly entertaining news comes this recent study:

Partying Republicans in Washington will have to step it up after a recent survey of D.C.-area bartenders praised Democrats as being better tippers and talkers than their GOP counterparts.

The survey of 100 D.C.-area bartenders, conducted by Clarus Research Group for Beam Global Spirits & Wine, cast Democrats as more favorable bar patrons, as bartenders said they were better tippers, have better pick-up lines and were better at giving toasts.

Oh, hell yes. That's my Dems. Better in every way, baby!

Snivelling Republicon spokesmen are casting aspersions on the survey, but the results are ironclad:

Brynna McCosker, the director of operations for Clarus, said the firm had tried to reduce sampling bias by surveying bartenders in parts of Washington seen as Republican strongholds, as well as Democratic hotspots.

Spin that, suckahs!

And lest you think this survey doesn't reflect political realities, consider this bit o' truthiness:

“Republicans seem to care little about America's tomorrow,” quipped another Democratic staffer. “Between mixed drinks, body shots and pitchers of beer, Democrats seem to care little about their tomorrow morning.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

This survey is useful for another reason. Should I ever turn this virtual cantina into a brick, mortar and bottle one, I'll know to charge Republicons a gratuity.

Drinks are free for Firedoglake denizens, who brought this very important survey to my attention, and available at a steep discount for Dems, who'll make it up in the tips and the talk. And for you, my darlings, as always, drinks are on the house.

Salud!

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

We knew it was coming, but it's still a great and historic moment (h/t Political Animal):

Barack Obama, claiming a prize never held by a black American, swept to the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday as thousands of national convention delegates stood and cheered his improbable triumph.

Former rival Hillary Rodham Clinton asked the convention delegates to make it unanimous "in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory." And they did, with a roar.

Competing chants of "Obama" and "Yes we can" floated up from the convention floor as Obama's victory was sealed. [...]

Nice to see America catching up on the equality front. I myself was getting just a tad tired of nothing but white buggers in office. And I think Obama's going to do a great job.

Certainly better than the alternative.

We could choose the uplifiting, inspiring and sensible Democrat, or we could pick.... the exact opposite:

Last week, senior Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice argued on a campaign conference call that there is "a pattern here of recklessness" when it comes to John McCain's
approach to national security. Referencing McCain's drive to target Iraq immediately after 9/11, Rice added, "There's something to be said for letting facts drive judgment" On the same call, Richard Clarke slammed "quick-draw McCain," calling him "reckless," "trigger-happy" and "discredited."

Yesterday, TNR's Michael Crowley noted that Richard Danzig isn't especially impressed with McCain's temperament, either.

Former Navy Secretary, Obama advisor, and potential future Defense Secretary Richard Danzig is at a Truman Project-sponsored panel here, where he's doing some gloating about recent Bush Administration foreign policy shifts....

A good moment came when Democratic Congressman Adam Smith of Washington, sitting in the audience, rose to ask Danzig for advice on how Democrats can deliver a tough foreign-policy message that will be credible to voters. When Danzig started to back euphemistically into the question, Smith -- a proponent of tougher Obama campaign tactics generally -- jumped back up. "Don't be subtle!" he implored. "Just hit! Just say, 'John McCain does not have an even temper, and how is that going to factor into national security?"

At that, Danzig played ball. "I think John McCain is well-known for 'losing it' in a variety of circumstances," he said -- something which has potential policy implications.

And for good measure, Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.), in separate interviews, talked about McCain's propensity to "explode," regardless of the
circumstances.

All of this comes just a few months after Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, one of McCain's conservative Republican colleagues and a man who's worked with McCain for years, raised serious doubts about McCain's temperament. "The thought of him being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Cochran said. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

He worries me, too. And it's not just his hot temper, it's his spectacularly bad choices in, well, everything. Let's see just how hideous McCain's judgement is, shall we?

In the wake of John McCain’s latest tacit admission that he’s got nothing to offer Americans other than fear itself — last month it was Iran, last week it was Russia, today it’s Iran again — it’s worth pointing out that John McCain and his foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann have a longstanding relationship with an Iranian collaborator.

I’m referring of course to Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious Iraqi former exile who was the source of much of the bad WMD intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq war. Chalabi has now been effectively disavowed by the administration because of his connections to Iranian regime, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, who the U.S.
has designated a “foreign terrorist organization.”

[snip]

Newsday’s Knute Royce reported that “The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a
U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence…to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets.”

Ahmad Chalabi viewed the United States, and the men and women of the American military, as mere instruments for the achieving of his goals. This is the man who John McCain defended as “a patriot.” An INC representative recently described Scheunemann and Chalabi as “close friends.”

Charming. With friends like that, America certainly won't need enemies: we'll have a plethora.

In other news, the Republicons have come to a difficult decision:

For quite some time now, Republicans have taken pleasure in calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Party." Apparently, using poor grammar is entertaining to Republicans, and has been for years. In 1996, the GOP platform excised references to the "Democratic Party" altogether.

This year, at long last, there's a sense of progress.

For years now, the GOP has gone after "Democrat schemes," "Democrat presidents," "Democrat Congresses" -- all phrases from the 1996 Republican platform, repeated many times since. Twenty years earlier, Bob Dole famously declared that all wars of the 20th century were "Democrat wars."

On Tuesday, members of the Republican platform committee meeting in Minneapolis voted down a proposal to call the opposition the "Democrat Party" in the 2008 platform. Instead, they'll go with the proper Democratic Party.

"We probably should use what the actual name is," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the panel's chairman. "At least in writing."

Probably. In writing, anyway. But no guarantees. After all, if the Republicons start slipping in the polls, nothing eviscerates the Democratic Party like leaving off the "ic," right?

These people really couldn't get much more sad, scary and ridiculous.

Way to Cheapen the Sacrifice, John

POW Week continues with the latest in exploitive fuckery.

It appears John "Did I Mention I'm a POW?" McLame's staff was serious when they proclaimed they weren't abusing using the POW theme enough.

It turns out being a POW is now considered an excuse for piss-poor taste in music*:

When CNN’s Walter Isaacson confronted John McCain about his professed love of the band of ABBA, which of course was a lame attempt to cater to “disaffected Hillary supporters” as his blogger Michael Goldfarb made clear, McCain (you guessed it) whipped out the trusty ol’ POW card to explain:

“What were you thinking?,” Isaacson asked him, looking incredulous.

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

Okay. Let's unpack this a bit. McCain wants us to believe that he got stuck in a forty fucking year time warp because he hit a SAM and ended up lodged in the Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years.

Fine. Say it's true. Say that he's so trapped in that moment that four decades hasn't been enough for him to recover and catch up on pop culture.

Taking that as a given, answer me this: Do we really need someone that fucking psychologically damaged as President? The point of personal tragedy, what truly makes it noble and honorable, is not simply surviving it. It's being able to overcome it and become a whole human afterward, complete with the capacity to enjoy the wonderful new things of the present and look forward to a future filled with exciting and novel things. I'm not dissing those who haven't been able to move past the worst moment of their lives. But I am saying that such people are not emotionally healthy enough to take on the extremely stressful and supremely challenging job of POTUS.

And I think that would be a good point - if McCain's claims were true. However, as in so many other areas of his sordid political career, he appears to have lied about this as well:

But, as Spencer Ackerman was quick to point out:

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972. Don’t try this sh** on me, McCain! Your POW experience has nothing to do with your Partridgey musical taste.

A hit. A very palpable hit! Once again, McCain goes down in flames. (Why, yes, I can see his crass and raise him one odious pun. Why do you ask?)

As low as that is, can't McCain do us one better? Can't he drag his celebrated status just that much further through the mud? Why yes, yes he can:

Well McCain went on Leno (known to we Letterman fans as "that hump" Leno) and the macro was hit:

Leno: "For a million dollars, how many houses do you have?"

McCain: "Could I just mention to you, Jay, that, at a moment of seriousness. I spent five-and-a-half years in a prison cell. I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair...

Holy. Fucking. Shit. I never thought anyone could so cheapen something as harsh as having been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, but he did it. He not only made it cheaper than a counterfeit imitation Rolex, he exceeded the cheap-drunk "Oh woe is me!" quotient by a factor of 10,000,000,000. Can't you just see his little lip quivering?

I'm not sure how much lower he can go with this, but I've no doubt he'll demonstrate, seeing as how his staff's already gone there when defending his Leno lamentations:

On Morning Joe today, Mika Brzezinski called it “an awkward moment” and Joe Scarborough said it reflected Maureen Dowd’s point that McCain’s “going to the well a bit too often.” But McCain spokesperson Nicole Wallace disagreed, saying, “it’s not a talking point, it’s a fact.” “It’s not thrown out there in anything other than an explanation,” said Wallace.

You know something? It's a damned good thing I sold my beautiful birdseye maple desk when I moved up here. I would've just split it in half hitting my head against it.

A Complete Rat Bastard Plaguing Our Wire Services

No, it's not McCain.

Although he is a complete rat bastard, and he does plague the news with lie after lie after histrionic fit, he's not the man I have in mind.

But you're close - this fucktard nearly joined the McCain campaign officially. He certainly seems on board clandestinely.

You all recall this spectacle just after news of Obama's VP selection broke:

I'm sure I don't have to point out there's a wee bit o' bias there.

The biased ratfucker is none other than the AP's very own Washington bureau chief:

The latest piece from Ron Fournier, the AP's Washington bureau chief and the man responsible for directing the wire service's coverage of the presidential campaign, on Joe Biden joining the Democratic ticket, is drawing a fair amount of attention this morning. More importantly, McCain campaign staffers are pushing it fairly aggressively to other reporters, in large part because it mirrors the Republican line with minimal variation.

That would probably be because Fournier loves McCain enough to bring him donuts with sprinkles, and Obama - not so much.

Steve Benen, former Carpetbagger and now Political Animal, has a catalogue of the the unapologetically biased "news" flying from the AP's wires. A sampling:

In March, for example, Fournier wrote an item -- whether it was a news article or an opinion piece was unclear -- that said Barack Obama is "bordering on arrogance," "a bit too cocky," and that the senator and his wife "ooze a sense of entitlement." To substantiate the criticism, Fournier pointed to ... not a whole lot. It was basically the Republicans' "uppity" talking point in the form of an AP article.

[snip]

When Obama unveiled his faith-based plan, the AP got the story backwards. When Obama talked about his Iraq policy on July 3, the AP said he'd "opened the door" to reversing course, even though he hadn't.

The AP's David Espo wrote a hagiographic, 1,200-word piece, praising McCain's "singular brand of combative bipartisanship," which was utterly ridiculous.

[snip]

The AP flubbed the story on McCain joking about killing Iranians, and then flubbed the story about McCain's promise to eliminate the deficit. It's part of a very discouraging trend for the AP that's been ongoing throughout the campaign.

And then, within hours of Obama announcing his running mate, there's Fournier again, writing up another piece -- whether it's a news article or an opinion piece is, again, unclear -- that the McCain campaign just loves.

The AP has slipped from being a source of news and has become, like so many other "news" outlets, a discount superstore for Republicon talking points.

I feel I need to say something here.

When the progressive blogosphere was pounding the traditional news sources for becoming stenographers, excoriating them for their "he said, she said, we're just repeating what we were told" style of "reporting," we did not mean that the news media should overcorrect and start spewing their personal opinions all over news stories.

What we meant was, you should stop being uncritical mouthpieces and engage in actual journalism.

It appears that we shall have to define this term, as the fucktards who style themselves "journalists" have no idea what it means.

They seem to have been deceived by the fact that "journalism" is similar to the word "journal." A journal, as we know, often refers to something akin to a private diary, in which thoughts and opinions are written down.

This is not to be confused for journalism, which is the act of not only reporting what you're told, but verifying that it's true.

Merriam Webster's online dictionary tells us that journalism is "writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation." The key words are "facts" and "without an attempt at interpretation."

This is stenography: "Bush says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

This is journalism: "Bush says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, several important sources within the intelligence community dispute this. Evidence supports their conclusion."

Going on to state baldly, "I therefore believe the President is a lying sack of shit" may be accurate, but is not journalism. That is what we might call an "editorial." It belongs on the editorial pages, not the fucking wire services.

What Ratfucker Ronnie is doing is presenting editorials as news items. He's encouraging his "reporters" to do the same. Since many news outlets rely on the wire services for all but the most local of news, many consumers of news are getting opinion pieces presented as objective news.

If this gets as far up your nose as it does mine, the incomparable Jane Hamsher has a delightful little tool for registering your displeasure.

Let's all be Pipers and get this rat out of town, shall we, my darlings?

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Americans seem to be a wee bit confused about the meaning of "conservative:"

In recent days, conservatives have renewed a long-running campaign to convince the American people that they live in a conservative nation and support conservative policies. Conservative talker Rush Limbaugh is leading the charge, but he’s been joined by a chorus of right-wingers as well.

Quoting the American Thinker, Limbaugh used a cherry-picked poll to falsely argue on his radio show yesterday that a “conservative majority” exists in America. He focused on a single question from a recent Battleground Poll in which respondents were asked to place themselves on a conservative-to-liberal ideological spectrum. Sixty percent of respondents labeled themselves “very conservative or somewhat conservative"...

[snip]

The truth is, however, that the so-called “conservative majority” does not exist. While many American’s may call themselves conservative, the overwhelming majority of Americans support progressive policies. Indeed, a majority of Americans…

– Want universal health care.
– Want to expand environmental protections.
– Support increasing the minimum wage.
– Want abortion to remain safe and legal.
– Want federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
– Want to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for national priorities.
– Want same-sex couples to be legally recognized.
– Oppose the Iraq war.

I hate to break this to my fellow Americans, but those are liberal positions. Conservatives stand exactly opposite liberals on all those issues. So, Rush Lamebaugh can crow all he likes about how the majority of Americans are conservative, but what we're actually dealing with here is ignorance over what the terms actually mean.

American ignorance and neocon fuckery. What else is new?

Speaking of immense blowhards who shouldn't be taken at all seriously, Karl "I Should Be In Prison" Rove thinks Michelle Obama didn't kiss America's ass enough:

In a speech last night at the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama “began a weeklong effort to present her husband — and his entire family — as embodiments of the American dream.” The Houston Chronicle writes, “Despite Republican attempts to paint her as a liberal elitist, she said in her speech that she knows from her family’s struggles and successes ‘that the American dream endures.’”

Totally disregarding Michelle Obama’s repeated efforts throughout her speech to spell out “why she loves her country,” Karl Rove — an informal adviser to John McCain — went on Fox News last night and proclaimed that Obama didn’t show “adequate enough” love for her country:

I don’t think she did too well on saying I love America. That wasn’t adequate enough because, look, people are gonna hear that, and then those that have paid attention to her earlier comments are gonna try and square those two off.

Are you fucking kidding me? Talking about how great America is and saying outright, "That is why I love this country" isn't enough? Seriously? That's it - Democrats should just give up. Nothing they every say or do is going to be enough for Rove and his merry band of batshit insane extreme right wing frothers.

We can expect no less from the "Ministry of Truth:"

Wow -- a leading Republican appears to have just inadvertently admitted that the GOP's spin machine set up to counter Barack Obama during the convention is a propaganda machine spewing nothing but lies.

The GOPer in question is Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams, who accidentally made the admission when describing the GOP's war room in Denver set up to hammer Obama during convention week.

Wadhams described the GOP's outfit thusly to the Denver Post: "Just consider this the Ministry of Truth."

Um, as anybody who has ever read George Orwell knows, the Ministry of Truth exists to disseminate false propaganda about how great the ruling regime is, continuously rewriting both history and the present-day facts in order to maintain total control over the population.

Sounds eerily familiar, don't it just? At least they're finally being honest on that point.

On the war on terror front, here's an interesting tidbit. One of McCain's favoritest lobbyists - I mean, advisers - would like to ensure even terrorists have free and easy access to guns:

We knew Randy Scheunemann, John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, was into guns. After all, in 1997 he was arrested for having a shotgun and several rounds of ammunition in his car on the grounds of the U.S.
Capitol. And in addition to his extensive lobbying work on behalf of former Soviet bloc countries, he's also a longtime lobbyist for gun-rights groups. But it now looks like, for Scheunemann, doing the bidding of the gun lobby takes precedence over efforts to combat terrorism.

Newsweek reports that, according to registration documents filed by Scheuenemann's lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, Scheunemann lobbied on behalf of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) against a bill that aims to close a gun-control loophole that inhibits the government from stopping people on terrorist watch-lists from buying guns. According to Newsweek, "the bill was inspired by an official audit covering a five-month period in 2004 which found that, because of the loophole, the Feds had to greenlight 35 out of 44 cases where a gun buyer was on a terrorist watch list."

This is taking the Second Amendment to some ridiculous extremes, don't you think? Mind you, those watch lists can be a little, shall we say, inaccurate, but still. Better safe than sorry when it comes to Teh Terrahrists, right? Isn't that why we eviscerated the Fourth Amendment, thumbed our noses at the Geneva Conventions, and decided that torture wasn't torture as long as we're doing it?

That's the state of our country today. If you're weeping now, I don't blame you. Have another drink.

Former POW Mangles McCain's POW Power

I'm not the only one who thinks McCain's milking his POW status to the point of absurdity. And this guy's got a fuck of a lot better street cred than I do:

As some of you might know, John McCain is a long-time acquaintance of mine that goes way back to our time together at the U.S. Naval Academy and as Prisoners of War in Vietnam. He is a man I respect and admire in some ways. But there are a number of reasons why I will not vote for him for President of the United States.

This isn't going to be pretty, now, is it?

People often ask if I was a Prisoner of War with John McCain. My answer is always "No - John McCain was a POW with me." The reason is I was there for 8 years and John got there 2 ½ years later, so he was a POW for 5 ½ years. And we have our own seniority system, based on time as a POW.

Oh, dear. I think Johnny got up the wrong vet's nose with his World's Greatest POW act.

John was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for heroism and wounds in combat. This heroism has been played up in the press and in his various political campaigns. But it should be known that there were approximately 600 military POW's in Vietnam. Among all of us, decorations awarded have recently been totaled to the following: Medals of Honor - 8, Service Crosses - 42, Silver Stars - 590, Bronze Stars - 958 and Purple Hearts - 1,249. John certainly performed courageously and well. But it must be remembered that he was one hero among many - not uniquely so as his campaigns would have people believe.

Is that wind I hear? Only it sounds like something's being sucked out of someone's sails.

John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did.

And that meaty sound would be someone getting cut down to size.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Heh. That's what I keep saying, too.

And there's a lot more where that came from. Believe it or not, I've given you only a taste.

Phillip Butler, who served this country with honor and distinction and then didn't go around turning his experience into cheap political currency, does not denigrate McCain's achievements. He respects McCain's service. He doesn't minimize the sacrifices McCain made for this country. But he puts it into context, and he looks at the whole of the man, and comes to the conclusion that this is one of the last fucking people on earth we should be voting into office.

I think we'd do well to listen to him.

(Tip o' the shot glass to dday over at Digby's, as well as Atheist Chaplain. Thanks for sending me backup.)

Neil Said There'd Be Days Like This

I hit the wall this weekend.

Last weekend was sweet and easy as anything. The world, as Terry Pratchett once so memorably put it, was my mollusc of choice. My Muse suited intention to action, and we Got Shit Done. It looked for a while there like we had a good thing going.

So I, of course, like an idiot, believed this weekend would be the same.

I'd even downloaded a fuckload of new music to help the muse along.

I'd made sure there was plenty of food laid in.

Preloaded some posts.

Cleaned me room.

Ready.

Aim.

*

Neil Gaiman wrote the greatest piece ever on writer's block. It's in the Introduction to his short story collection Smoke and Mirrors, and I'll reproduce the pertinent bit here, begging his forgiveness:

I'd been having a bad week. The script I was meant to be writing just wasn't happening, and I'd spent days staring at a blank screen, occasionally writing a word like the and staring at it for an hour or so and then, slowly, letter by letter, I'd delete it and write and or but instead. Then I'd exit without saving.

That's exactly how it is.

Imagine yourself consigned to the deepest pit of uttermost black despair, and then imagine being handed a shovel and told you're not quite finished sinking yet. That's how this weekend has been. I spent six hours writing two sentences. And I'm not even sure I'm going to keep those. The story feels like a lead-encrusted butterfly with half its wings torn away. At this point, there's just no chance in the universe this poor broken thing's ever going to fly.

It's terrible. Stick it in a blender, press MUTILATE, and it would only be an improvement.

It has no direction. No purpose. No meaning. No intensity, conflict, interest, or redeeming quality whatsoever.

Neil, speaking to the masochists who choose to subject themselves to National Novel Writer's Month, warned us it was coming:

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you're probably ready to give up. You're past that first fine
furious rapture when every character and idea is new and
entertaining. You're not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the
end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster
than you can get them down on paper. You're in the middle, a little
past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone,
your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random
email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least
accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more---and
that even when they do you're preoccupied and no fun. You don't know
why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined
that anyone would want to read it, and you're pretty sure that even if
you finish it it won't have been worth the time or energy and every
time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in
your head when you began---a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel,
in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better
than the best book you ever read---it falls so painfully short that
you're pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole
thing.

Welcome to the club.

That's how novels get written.

That's how stories get written, too, actually.

You know something? Novels are easier. There's always some other bit you can work on. They're spacious enough you can allow yourself to babble until plot, theme, character, and all that rot get themselves untangled and settle into some semblance of decency. Every word has to count, of course, but they don't have to count for quite so much. Whereas, in a short story, constraints of length place demands on each and every word that would be considered exploitation were they employees.

I'll be honest with you. I've always felt considerable antipathy for short form writing. Oh, I like it when it goes well, mind you, and it's nice to have a completed project in something on the order of weeks rather than years, but still. I bloody hate writing short stories.

Except.

Except for the challenge. I likes me the challenge. Because, let's face it, the dam will eventually break. Words will come spilling out in a thousand gorgeous waterfalls over the jagged slabs of concrete. And some of those words will splash on the page, and I'll have arranged them just so. Reduced those glorious streams to their barest essence. There's something profoundly satisfying about saying so much with so little, like those evocative few lines of ink that somehow paint an entire landscape in Zen art.

And it can happen. It will happen. Just not this weekend.

So it goes.

You don't give in to despair.

You push through the pain.

You engage in creative wastes of time.

And you remember what Neil said.

And you never, ever, give up.

That's how stories get written. Eventually.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Petraeus to McCain: You're full of shit:

Gen. David Petraeus, top commander of coalition military forces in Iraq, recently sat down with Newsweek to do a “valedictory” interview before he takes up his new post as CENTCOM commander next month.

Newsweek reported that while Petraeus recognized that al-Qaeda in Iraq has been significantly diminished, he refusesd to say the terror group had been “defeated.” Moreover, Petraeus acknowledged that the recent successes in Iraq may have been possible without the surge:

Petraeus is careful not to credit all the progress to the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. The sea change came last year from a series of movements now known as the Awakening. […] So could the Sunni Awakening have succeeded without the surge? Possibly, he concedes.

Yet, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) disagrees with Petraeus, who McCain recently named as one of “the three wisest people” that he would rely heavily on as president. Last month during an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, McCain dismissed the notion that security in
Iraq may have improved without the so-called “surge” of U.S. forces there...

What a non-ringing endorsement of McCain's "The Surge is teh awesome!" rhetoric. Funny how everybody but McLame seems to grasp the realities of foreign policy and the debacle that is the Iraq war, even the fucking commander of the fucking Iraq war.

Seems to me I've read somewhere recently that the Surge was a useless fucking fiasco that actually set us back.... ah, yes:

Yesterday, CAP’s Brian Katulis appeared on CSPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss recent developments in Iraq with John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security. Here, Katulis suggests an explanation for why declining violence has not led to political progress among Iraq’s leaders...

Transcript:

KATULIS: The notion of the surge, that if we decrease violence and make people feel more secure, would lead to political transition and progress on that front, I think we should question it. Because if you look at key fundamentals, if you look at what the surge has actually done, it may have in fact frozen into place a very fractured and fragmented country.

A key feature of the surge, for instance, was providing support to the Sons of Iraq — an independent security force, largely Sunni, but with some Shiites involved. I worry that the story of Iraq since 2003 has been a story of a country that has fractured and fragmented, and what happened during the surge, in a sense, [was that] rather than creating greater incentives for the different Iraqi factions to come together on the key issues that still remain unresolved — Kirkuk, Article 140, the oil law, the budget, a whole host of issues — rather than achieving progress, we may have actually impeded it by freezing into place a very divided society.

Well, that's a bit of an eye-opener, innit? Who could have possibly imagined that Bush's stupid-stubborn warmongering policies could set us back? Such a shock, lemme tell ya.

How well have we done in Iraq? Well enough that Maliki is doing everything he can to kick us the fuck out before we can "help" any more:

I suppose we can debate the meaning of the word "timetable," but this sounds like we're talking about an agreement that goes well beyond "aspirational time horizons."

Iraq and the United States have agreed that all U.S. troops will leave by the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday, but Washington said no final deal had been reached.

"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

"An open time limit is not acceptable in any security deal that governs the presence of the international forces," he said.

Shorter Maliki: Get the fuck out of my country. Can't say as I blame him. And while the White House tries to spin this as "we haven't agreed yet," which can be translated into, "We haven't yet applied enough pressure to make that upstart bastard toe our party line," Maliki seems pretty certain of what his country wants and that they're going to get it.

He's found his balls. Good on him.

Moving on back to the fuckery at home, we have the Republicons desperately trying to pretend there's this maclargehuge rift between Clintonistas and Obamaniacs. They've released ads, spouted talking points, and have most of the media lapping up their drivel, but one reporter ain't buying it:

But before the networks take the ad too seriously, they should consider an anecdote about the "chicken prank" from TNR's Eve Fairbanks.

I almost feel like a dupe writing about the second pro-Hillary ad McCain released today at 6am: It's a stunt, a trick meant to keep him in the press during the Democratic convention and gin up more Hillary-Obama-tension media storylines. Message: neener neener neener.

It is, in fact, the political equivalent of a prank legendarily pulled at my high school in which students procured well fewer than 20 live chickens, numbered them 1 through 20 with magic markers (leaving some numbers out), set them loose, and then sat back and gleefully watched as hapless school officials ran around the school searching for the remaining missing chickens that had never actually existed.

That's precisely what they're doing: running after imaginary chickens. Republicons do have rich imaginations, and most of the MSM likes to play pretend right along with them.

Note to MSM: you're total fucking dupes. How's it feel to be such blithering idiots?

What else can we expect from a press corps that likes to engage in this sort of behavior:

The Fox & Friends team broadcasted live from a bar in downtown Denver today, the opening day of the Democratic National Convention — where they seemed to spend nearly as much time schmoozing with scantily-clad women as they did talking about politics. Segment after segment featured Broncos cheerleaders, Hooters waitresses, with Brian Kilmeade joking about joining the security team to “pat down” the cheerleaders; when Steve Doocy’s son Peter discussed Fox on Twitter, Steve joked that Kilmeade “just twittered the cheerleaders a minute ago!”

This is Faux News's idea of "family values programming" and "incisive political analysis." The sad thing is, this isn't far behind the standard of our media in general.

Is it any wonder Americans look so fucking stupid when they go to the polls?

Being a Former POW is No Excuse

For years, I begged my father to watch Full Metal Jacket with me. He claimed it was the only Vietnam movie that ever got it right. Anyone who wanted to know about Vietnam was told to see the film, and they'd know exactly how it was. But he refused to watch it with me, and he refused to let me see it. "You wouldn't understand," he'd say in gruff, very final tones whenever I asked. "You're not old enough."

He'd let me see any other Vietnam flick. Platoon - no problem, once I'd hit my teens. We saw Born on the Fourth of July together. He laughed his ass off at all of the people who said how authentic it was. Those weren't real Vietnam movies. They were just fantasies, and that's probably why he let me see them.

He even encouraged me to read Run Between the Raindrops, which he said was the best book ever written about 'Nam. He gave me a list of names to take rubbings of when the Traveling Wall came through town. He started telling me more than just the funny stories: he told the tragic ones. But he still refused to watch Full Metal Jacket with me. I began to think we never would.

And then, one night a few months after I was raped at knifepoint, he sat me down. Very grave, very serious, with a video in his hand. "Honey, you're a survivor now, just like me. Now, you'll understand."

I swear to you, I thought he'd lost his fucking mind. I'd been in fear for my life for all of ten minutes, until I figured out who the asshole behind the ski mask was and realized that whatever other indignities I might suffer, death wasn't even in it. I grant you, it was the worst experience of my life, and one it took a long time to come back from, but for fuck's sake: one bad morning compared to a year of getting shot at? Spending over a hundred days wearing boots because every time you took them off, you came under mortar fire and thus started getting a tad superstitious? Earning a passel of purple hearts because you took shrapnel from a grenade and got shot in the face? And not Dick-Cheney's-friend shot, either. This wasn't a little peppering of birdshot fixed up by a few bandages - my dad's jaw was shattered. He's still got shrapnel working its way through his body. I've seen the bumps on his chest where it's coming to the surface. Just for the sake of comparison, it started its journey in his ankle.

Those incredible people he'd fought beside, who had kept me amused on many a storytelling evening: a lot of them had been killed. I took their names off a stark black wall. My father still couldn't face seeing them there.

And he wanted me to believe that what I'd experienced compared. He believes that himself. Who was I to argue? Fuck, if it meant we were finally going to watch Full Metal Jacket together, hell yes, I'm just like a Vietnam vet! Totally similar experiences. You betcha.

I will use my father's verdict on the comparability of experiences once again in order to comment upon John McCain's unrelenting fuckery, and the gulliable patsies who let him get away with it. I will tell you what being a rape survivor does not let me get away with, and since this is analogous to the horrors of Vietnam, these things must also hold true for McCain. QED.

Being a rape survivor does not make me an unimpeachable expert on rape, the combatting thereof, and all things remotely related to it. Being a POW does not make John McCain an expert on war, the fighting thereof, and all things remotely related to it. It apparently doesn't even make him an expert on torture, because if it had, he wouldn't have worked so hard to allow America to engage in it. (Imagine me redefining my rape as somehow "not rape" so that sexual violence could be legally perpetrated against women. Morally repugnant? I think so. But that's essentially what McCain has done.)

Being a rape survivor doesn't make me any less of a nimrod when I get geographical facts wrong. My teachers didn't forgive my errors of fact by virtue of my elevated status. When McCain says Czechoslovakia still exists and moves Iran out of the way so Pakistan can border Iraq, despite the fact he's a POW, he's still a fucking nimrod. I didn't get any free passes in college. He shouldn't get free passes in this race.

Being a rape survivor doesn't put my integrity beyond reproach. If I lie, sling mud, or cheat, I can't use the rape survivor shield to fend off criticism. So why does McCain get to be a lying, cheating, mud-slinging asshat and still be thought of as an honorable, straight-talking maverick just because he's a POW? What happened to us once when we were younger cannot and should not be used to excuse the reality of who we are now.

Being a rape survivor does not mean I get to claim that I'm a better person than my opponents because I survived rape and they didn't. McCain is no better than the people he smears - in fact, he's far less of a good man than they are. If we're going to be claiming higher ground by virtue of our travails, we'd better be fucking standing on it.

I can't use my status as a rape survivor to disclaim responsibility for the actions I take, the things I say, the people I hurt, and all my many failures. It infuriates me that McCain thinks this status as a POW allows him to do all of that and so much more.

Let me paraphrase Terry Pratchett here: "Just because someone's a POW doesn't mean he's not a nasty, small-minded jerk."

McCain is.

There are plenty of vets who don't milk their status for all its worth, good men who don't believe that Vietnam gave them a free lunch for life card. Take my father, for instance: he could have parlayed his status as a vet into a college education, housing assistance, and health care, to name a few of the benefits available. He didn't. He refuses to apply for veteran's benefits. This man was fucking drafted, his life was totally derailed, his college career ended, and yet he thinks his country doesn't owe him jack fucking shit. His country called on him to serve, he served in a war he despised, and he believes it was no more than his responsibility as a citizen.

He never, not once, has used Vietnam as an excuse for anything more than the reason why he'll ask me to move my seat so he's not sitting with his back to a door in a restaurant. That's it.

McCain spits on people like my father whenever he expects his status as a POW to put him on a shining pedestal, without doing one damned thing to earn it. He spits on people like me when he uses it to excuse his moral, political and human failings. He spits on us all when he uses his status to get ahead.

It's time we stopped letting him get away with it.

It's POW Week at the Cantina

McCain doesn't think he talks about his POW status enough. Oh, noes! People might not realize he's a really-real super duper war hero if he doesn't bring it up at every single solitary opportunity! Quick: let every sentence be a noun, a verb, and POW!

This is an invitation I cannot resist.

Especially since I already have four out of the seven posts that would be necessary to have a POW Week. I'm sure, in light of what McCain believes, I'll have no trouble filling in the rest.

But why should we stop with just a few potshots at his ridiculous overuse of his history?

Why not open this up to you, my darlings?

Can you think of contests? Polls? Shall we start a list, with my crack army bringing back war trophies from their favorite political sites?

McCain wants to trivialize and debase his sacrifice. In the process, he trivializes and debases the sacrifices of so many other POWs, who served with as much (or more) honor, who came home and didn't spit on honor by turning their status into a cheap political trump card. It's fucking outrageous, is what it is. It shows us exactly what sort of man McCain is.

He wants it brought up more? Fine.

We'll bring it up.

Fucking endlessly.

And while we will never trivialize what these brave soldiers endured, we will most fucking certainly trivialize the use to which John "Exploiter" McLame has put it to.

Game on.

LMAO

This is absolutely fucking priceless. Michael Goldfarb, official McCain blogger extraordinaire, has been hard at work denigrating anti-McCain bloggers and New York Times editorial writers as being just like "the average Daily Kos diarist sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of Dungeons & Dragons.” He seems rather enamored of the analogy, seeing as how he keeps using it.

I see he's painted a target on himself. Let the fun begin in three... two... one...

After the first insulting comment, Goldfarb backed away, while sticking to the vernacular: “If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.”

This led my friend Adam Serwer to raise an excellent point.

That’s the kind of deep, personal animosity that you associate with experience, which clearly Goldfarb has. It’s not hard to imagine that some basement somewhere holds the abandoned d20s, dusty rulebooks, and broken heart of a young Michael Goldfarb who never got to be Dungeon Master because he wouldn’t stop yelling. In fact, it’s hard not to wonder if, when Michael Goldfarb is berating the D&D players of the world, he’s really just berating Michael Goldfarb.

Ta-Nehisi Coates added, “[W]e often are what we hate. Goldfarb remark smacks of a geek trying to get down by slamming other geeks.”

The good news is, the “Pro-Obama Dungeons and Dragons crowd” is apparently getting organized. I can’t help but wonder if the McCain campaign has inadvertently woken an angry nerd army….

This is what happens when you behave like a supercilious little snot toward people intelligent enough to work out the gawd-awful complexities of the D&D system.

Methinks Goldfarb's dug hisself a hole even Elminster couldn't magic him out of.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

The McCain camp has officially bounced their reality check:

We talked the other day about the McCain campaign overplaying the prisoner-of-war card, so much so that even sympathetic reporters have begun questioning McCain for "trivializing" his service.

For its part, the McCain campaign has come to the opposite conclusion.

They will be prepared to show McCain's "home" in Hanoi by using images of his cell. They claim they have not overused the POW element and insist they have "underused it."

There's no indication that McCain aides were kidding.

Underused it. Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

Just off the top of my poor, POW-abused brain, I can think of the following instances where they've fallen back on the POW plan: in response to the houses dust-up, in campaign commercials, healthcare, foreign policy, every time McCain tells a lame joke... they've played it so fucking often I'm losing count, even their biggest fans in the media are starting to groan, it's become a lame joke, and they still think they're underusing it?

Puh-leeze.

But even though McCains Media admirers are giving him a bit of guff over the whole exploitation of this POW status thing, they're still firmly on his side:

Last week Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told Politico that he did not know how many homes he and his wife Cindy own. “I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said. ThinkProgress noted that even though McCain’s
comment highlights his poor record on the housing crisis and his economic policies that primarily benefit the rich, many in the media leaped to McCain’s defense, saying the gaffe was not “a big deal.”

Today on ABC’s This Week, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin took the media’s McCain defense a step further, arguing that the fact that McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns “is going to be one of the worst moments in the entire campaign” — not for McCain, but for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL):

HALPERIN: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.

Talk about reaching. Obama's already survived all that. It was going to come up anyway - you know the wingnuts wouldn't pass up those juicy items in the general election. And no matter how you spin it, the fact remains that McCain looks a fuck of a lot worse than Obama with this.

Gotta love that incisive MSM commentary though, right? What a bunch of fucking morons.

This is the only way to treat such swill:

Griff Jenkins, a Fox Television correspondent, was waiting with a microphone for a crowd of demonstrators on a Denver street today, hoping to catch signs of a breakup of the herd of cats known as the American Left.

[snip]

Griff, an affable pencil neck, went to the middle of the street and waitied for the march to envelop him. Here they came, hordes of scruffy, awful looking people with who knows what on their minds, seemingly capable of World Bank, er, world class anarchy. Fox viewers watched with anticipation on the edges of their scratchy plaid furniture. What would happen?

Griff valiantly held up his mike to the first guy, "What are you demonstrating about?"

"Fuck you," came the reply.

Undaunted, Griff tried again, holding up his blunt instrument to another demonstrator, then another.

Maybe a half dozen answers pretty much exactly the same: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. They were mostly smiling, no doubt drenched in cannabisism.

Then Griff hit paydirt: a protester who could (would), speak a sentence. "We don't talk to Fox."

Heh. Way to tell 'em.

(My apologies, my darlings. The political news so far today is thinner than John McCain's hair.)

Sunday Sensational Science

New York City could be in for a big shake-up someday. A new study discovered that several small faults thought to be inactive are, well, merely resting:

Many faults and a few mostly modest quakes have long been known around New York City, but the research casts them in a new light. The scientists say the insight comes from sophisticated analysis of past quakes, plus 34 years of new data on tremors, most of them perceptible only by modern seismic instruments. The evidence charts unseen but potentially powerful structures whose layout and dynamics are only now coming clearer, say the scientists. [snip] The researchers found concrete evidence for one significant previously unknown structure: an active seismic zone running at least 25 miles from Stamford, Conn., to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y., where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. The Stamford-Peekskill line stands out sharply on the researchers' earthquake map, with small events clustered along its length, and to its immediate southwest.

Unless you're a fan of disaster flicks, "New York City" and "earthquake" probably don't occur to you in the same sentence frequently. But the Earth is full o' faults. They pop up in rather surprising places, like the center of the United States, and do astonishing things, like make the Mississippi River flow backwards for a time. Seriously, it happened.

When we think of earthquakes, I think most of us think of the devastation. We don't really think so much about what earthquakes are telling us about how our world works. And we don't think about their landscaping skills. They're really fascinating things, especially if you don't have to worry much about being hit by one.

Let's have a look at where that's likely to be.


If you know anything about plate tectonics, you're noticing a pattern about now: earthquakes mark out the boundaries of the plates pretty well. And the types of earthquakes tell us a lot about the type of boundary we're seeing. For instance, shallow-depth, low-intensity earthquakes occur at mid-ocean ridges, while areas demonstrating a continuum of shallow, intermediate or deep quakes - a Wadati-Benioff zone - shows us we've got a subduction zone.


Earthquakes have taught us things as diverse as what the interior of the world might look like and whether some absolute bastard's exploded a nuclear bomb on the sly. That's because you can learn a lot from a seismic wave. Different types of waves travel differently depending on what caused them and what they're traveling through:
Seismic Waves

The mechanical properties of the rocks that seismic waves travel through quickly organize the waves into two types. Compressional waves, also known as primary or P waves, travel fastest, at speeds between 1.5 and 8 kilometers per second in the Earth's crust. Shear waves, also known as secondary or S waves, travel more slowly, usually at 60% to 70% of the speed of P waves.

P waves shake the ground in the direction they are propagating, while S waves shake perpendicularly or transverse to the direction of propagation.

All of this is fascinating and informative stuff, but it may not have a personal meaning for you. Unless you live in volcano country, that is. If that's the case, harmonic tremors become your dearest friends. Harmonic tremors alert scientists to the movement of magma beneath a volcano, and a swarm of them lets you know that it's maybe kinda sorta time to run like hell.

This is good information to have when you live next to a volcano.

Earthquakes don't just destroy and warn: they sculpt. Some pretty amazing landscapes have been created by them.


On our left, we have a canyon in Jordan created by water eroding an earthquake fissure.






















And to our right, an earthquake fissure in California that, with enough time and running water, could become a rather spectacular gorge.























Here's Earthquake Lake in Montana, created one day in 1959 when an earthquake triggered a landslide that formed a natural dam. Bet you the beavers were jealous.







I hope this whirlwind tour of earthquakes has given you at least some sense that they do far more than just make things shake and knock cities down. They're pretty fantastic things, quite useful, and even wonderful. As long as you don't have to meet one in person... good luck on that, New York.

Way to Support the Troops

Time now for a case study in the way the Bush regime rules.

1. Through neglect and general incompetence, create a problem that never should have existed:

Mold infests the barracks that were set up here a year ago for wounded soldiers after poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center triggered a systemwide overhaul, soldiers say. [snip]

Early last week, soldiers told USA TODAY that in April they first noticed what looked like layers of mold in flexible air ducts above their rooms when ventilation covers were removed to be cleaned. "(The duct work) was just caked black," said Sgt. Willard Barnett, 51, an Iraq war veteran.

Some soldiers said they have been affected by air in their rooms.

"When I wake up in the morning, I have crud in my eyes, and I have like this slimy phlegm in the back of my throat," said Spc. James Dodson, 26.

2. "Fix" the problem by telling people to pretend it doesn't exist:

Twenty soldiers, who spoke to USA TODAY early last week, said their complaints about mold and other problems went unheeded for months. They also said they had been ordered not speak about the conditions at Fort Sill.

3. When those affected by the problem are driven by desperation to bring in the media spotlight, feign concern and promise immediate action:

Officers at the Army base last week ordered that ventilation ducts in two barracks be replaced and soldiers be surveyed, anonymously if they wished, about any concerns. Maj. Gen. Peter Vangjel, the commanding officer, said it was "inappropriate" for soldiers to be ordered not to talk about the mold.

"We're going in and we're going to take care of this for these guys," he said over the weekend.

4. Deny, deny, deny:

The commander general of Fort Sill has denied published reports that said complaints about mold in the barracks of wounded soldiers went “unheeded for months.”

5. At the first available opportunity, fire the fucker who blew the whistle:

An Army social services coordinator here who told USA TODAY about poor conditions at Fort Sill's unit for wounded soldiers has been forced out of his job, the employee and base officials said Tuesday.

Soldiers meeting with Army Secretary Pete Geren here on Tuesday said Chuck Roeder, 54, was a strong advocate for their problems and should not have been forced to leave.

[snip]

Roeder, a retired soldier, said he was told to resign or he would be fired.

6. Deny and smear:

Roeder's departure Friday, following his contact with USA TODAY, was purely coincidental, said Col. Sam White, an executive officer at Fort Sill. He said Roeder has a history of confrontations with base officials.

"They can say whatever they want to say, but they're not being truthful," Roeder said. "I stand up for soldiers. I'm sure the word got out that I'd encouraged soldiers to speak."

[snip]

Geren, who was at Fort Sill for a previously scheduled visit, said he would look into Roeder's case but that it was difficult to manage hirings and firings from his office in Washington.

Repeat until country in shambles.

Tell me again why Bush shouldn't be impeached. It's his blueprint they're following. He's the one who's politicized every aspect of government, encouraged incompetents and opportunists to infest every level of our infrastructure, and sold this country right up shit creek (paddles sold separately).

And tell me again that it's the Republicons, not the Democrats, who support our troops.

(Tip o' the shot glass to Think Progress.)

McCain Proves His Economic Ignorance for the 2,438,956th Time

McCain's recent economic assessment:

On her radio show today, conservative talker Laura Ingraham asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) what he believed should be done to address the struggling U.S. economy. Ingraham listed several economic indicators that have declined in recent years to make her point. McCain dismissed the premise of Ingraham’s question, saying, “I still believe the fundamentals of our economy are strong”...

What wonderful news! Let's have a look at those strong economic fundamentals, then:

It’s not clear which fundamentals McCain is referring to. Eight years of conservative management have left the economy with something other than “strong” fundamentals:

- Inflation is rising. The U.S. economy is currently experiencing “the worst 12 months of inflation in almost three decades.”

- Real wages are declining. Americans are experiencing a “de facto pay cut.” “Almost everything costs more, even as [Americans] have less money to pay for it.”

- Unemployment is increasing. Americans have experienced “seven consecutive monthly declines in employment.”

- Cost of food is rising. Food prices are quickly increasing and even school lunches across the country will be more expensive in the coming year.

- Optimism about economy is declining. “Optimism in the U.S. economy among CEOs of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies” is at a 16-year low. Americans are similarly pessimistic.

- Foreclosures are still increasing. Home foreclosures were up 55 percent over last year in July and “17 [percent] of all homes for sale in the U.S. are repossessed properties.”

Yup. Them thar's some really strong fundamentals. You just keep right on believing that, Johnny, and we'll keep right on calling you a total fuckwit. Fair enough?

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

I've just spent two hours looking for political news that isn't Biden. Not much joy, I'm afraid. I did just have the rather amusing experience of breaking the news to my Obamaniac roommate and her boyfriend - apparently, their texts didn't get to them. For once, I am vindicated! Being a stay-at-home, intertoobz-addicted, email-reliant, cell phone-spurning Luddite has served me well today.

The more I read, the more Biden seems like a solid choice. Here is a man who, in all his years of politics, seems to have suffered one major controversy: he lifted bits of a speech from another bloke. You'll hear a lot of talk of plagarism. Like all Republicon talking points, this one's full of smoke and sizzle, but they rather forget to include the steak:

But those articles did not note that while Biden did not attribute portions of a Kinnock speech he paraphrased during an August 23, 1987, Democratic presidential primary debate, and during an August 26, 1987, interview for the National Education Association, Biden reportedly had credited Kinnock. According to a September 13, 1987, Washington Post article, "Biden and reporters covering his campaign said that in speeches before and after that debate the senator has given Kinnock credit for the same passionate rhetoric, which he has used repeatedly in recent weeks." Specifically, the Post reported that "John Quinlan, a reporter for the Sioux City Journal, said his notes showed Biden said he was quoting Kinnock when he used the same passage in a speech Aug. 14. Stories in The [New York] Times, The Boston Globe and other newspapers also said Biden had used the rhetoric and credited Kinnock for it."

Plagarism, as far as I remember (and keep in mind the issue occupies a fair amount of my attention, me being a writer and all), is defined as filching someone's words and using them without proper citation, passing them off as your own. When you don't pass them off as your own and you do credit the source, it's not fucking plagarism. End of controversy.

And to those who might moan that he forgot to credit his source every damned time, fuck you. If you've credited the same fucking words five thousand fucking times, it's easy to assume the people listening to you are adults who can figure it out. It's too bad that assumption is the wrong one when it comes to our nation's media.

Biden's certainly not going to slack on the counter-attack. A Kos diarist has a string of video clips highlighting some of his greatest moments. And he's already gone straight for the jugular as Obama's running mate:

In a speech accepting his role as Barack Obama’s running mate this afternoon in Springfield, IL, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) argued the American Dream has slipped away under eight years of Bush administration policies. He added that while Americans sit at their kitchen tables worrying about bills, McCain has to “figure out which of the 7 kitchen tables to sit at...”

Very ouch. And then, the KO:

Biden also referenced this quote from McCain in 2005: “On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I’ve been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.” “You can’t change America when you supported Bush’s policies 95 percent of the time,” Biden said.

Mmmm, spicy.

Biden's not just an attack dog, though. He's what the Republicons aren't: a genuine family man:

...Obama told a story about Biden's background that a lot of people may not have known.

"[Biden] he picked himself up, worked harder than the other guy, and got elected to the Senate -- a young man with a family and a seemingly limitless future.

"Then tragedy struck. Joe's wife Neilia and their little girl Naomi were killed in a car accident, and their two boys were badly hurt. When Joe was sworn in as a Senator, there was no ceremony in the Capitol -- instead, he was standing by his sons in the hospital room where they were recovering. He was 30 years old.

"Tragedy tests us -- it tests our fortitude and it tests our faith. Here's how Joe Biden responded. He never moved to Washington. Instead, night after night, week after week, year after year, he returned home to Wilmington on a lonely Amtrak train when his Senate business was done. He raised his boys -- first as a single dad, then alongside his wonderful wife Jill, who works as a teacher. He had a beautiful daughter. Now his children are grown and Joe is blessed with five grandchildren. He instilled in them such a sense of public service that his son, Beau, who is now Delaware's Attorney General, is getting ready to deploy to Iraq. And he still takes that train back to Wilmington every night.

This is the man the McLame camp is attempting to call Paris Hilton. Good fucking luck with that.

But campaigns are one thing. What will he bring to the table as a Vice President? Plenty (h/t Obsidian Wings):

"But what has impressed me most, for years, is his staff. He knows how to pick ‘em, and that’s no small thing. Brilliant people come and go in DC, but rarely do they also have the ability to pick quality staff the way Biden does. His folks always are among the brightest from a policy standpoint, but also possess a sophisticated political acumen. It’s a rare but valuable combination....

[snip]

As a result of having a staff that is so good, Biden is almost never behind the curve of policy developments. He’s proactive, not reactive.That’s a huge strategic advantage, and as a result, becoming a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a badge of validation among foreign policy folks. Further than that, you’ll hear from many foreign policy experts how closely they work with Biden. They’re not making it up. Biden counts on a broad range of people to get the job done right. Many, many people feel they have influence on his approach and as a result when the final product is announced, they feel invested, but the view is all Biden, and usually better. Biden collects the best. Simple as that.

This translates in a big way to an executive branch position. If Obama-Biden is the winning ticket, lots of people will be brought in to reverse the reckless policies of the past 7 years and put America on the right track. With such a small window of time and so much to do, picking the right people is critical. Biden recognizes talent, and has learned how to pick people with sound policy judgment but who can also navigate the interagency, and the multiple political roadblocks thrown in the path of even the purest of intentions. This could be his greatest contribution to an Obama administration.

Sounds like exactly what this country needs, doesn't it? So yes. I'm not ecstatic, but I'm very pleased indeed.

Now, moving away from all things Biden, let's have a look at some of the delicious political fuckery buried beneath all the excitement.

Yglesias informs us that the timeline for withdrawl for Iraq isn't a result of the success of the surge. We could have gotten the fuck out of Dodge over a year ago, with the same saving of face and a hell of a lot less casualties:

When you look at the information coming out about the new Iraq SOFA and its timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, it’s worth putting it in the context of this pre-war argument between Bush and Nouri al-Maliki. Here’s a January 2007 account:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national security adviser proposed that U.S. troops withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.

[snip]

Details, of course, differ and there were some problems with Maliki’s proposal from the point of view of operational specifics. But basically back in November 2006, Iraqi political leaders and progressives in the United States alike wanted to see some kind of phased redeployment of American troops out of Iraqi cities and then out of Iraq. Bush, instead, opted for the “surge” strategy and now eighteen months later we’re . . . doing roughly what Maliki wants which is roughly what he wanted 18 months ago which is roughly what progressives have been saying we should do for a log [sic] time.

Translation: we were right all along. Again. The only reason we stayed in Iraq, the only reason for the surge and "stay the course" and all of that destructive bullshit was so that Monkey Boy George could play megawarrior just a little while longer.

That would've been fine if those hadn't been living, breathing soldiers he's been playing Army with.

What else can you expect, though, from a bunch of mouth-breathing losers who for some incredibly fucked-up reason believe Iraq invited us to invade?

On Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes tonight, conservative pundit Dick Morris tried to attack Barack Obama for being inexperienced on foreign policy, but in doing so, only managed to demonstrate his own idiocy. Morris argued that Joseph Biden would be a good vice presidential selection for Obama because Obama “does not know anything” about foreign policy.

To back up this claim, Morris asserted that Obama made a major mistake this week when he referenced the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq in the context of discussing Russia’s incursion into Georgia. Obama said, “We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies. They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.” Asked by Alan Colmes what is wrong with Obama’s statement, Morris explained:

Where he’s wrong is that we went into Iraq at the invitation of the government, not as an invasion.

Well, Dick, I'd like to see that invitation. Was it a cheap, mass-produced Hallmark version, or did Saddam dip it in gold leaf for us? Did we RSVP or did just show up unannounced?

Someone here doesn't know jack fucking shit about foreign policy. I'll give you a hint: Obama's not the nimrod...

And, finally, it's a day ending in Y, so it's time for news of Yet More Unbelievable Corruption as the Republicons politicize absolutely everything they can lay their hands upon. This time, it's the Mississippi Supreme Court, where conservative judges want a left-leaning judge to just shut the fuck up:

A jaw dropping report out today in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal:

Something unusual happened Thursday at the Mississippi Supreme Court.

It may be the first time a majority of the justices voted to prohibit a colleague from publishing a dissent in a case.

In other words, Presiding Justice Oliver Diaz of Ocean Springs disagreed with a court decision and wanted to write about it. His fellow judges said, no, he couldn’t and they apparently stopped the court clerk from filing Diaz’s statement into the record.

Diaz's document also wasn’t made available to the public, as every other order and dissent are.

"My job as a Supreme Court justice is to write opinions and dissents, when necessary," Diaz said later Thursday. "I was prevented from doing so by a majority of the court."
...
Banning a justice from publishing his dissent is highly unusual, said a former state judge, who asked not to be identified.

Diaz speculates it "may be unprecedented in the history of American jurisprudence."

They've taken silencing dissent to a whole new level. No justice that I have ever heard of has ever been told he can't publish a dissent. No matter how much the majority disagrees with him or her, it's always been an important part of our legal process. The fact that they're willing to shut down even that tells me what kind of dictatorship we'd end up with if these fucking crooks stayed in power.

It's time to clean house. Somebody buy Biden a broom...

In Which I Answer Another Reader's Question, and Explain a Few of the Mechanics of Writing

This is almost as fun as bashing stupid politicians, and a lot more pleasant. Keep the questions coming.

Atheist Chaplain (who, nudge nudge, has a delightful blog of his own) asks:

Just a question, are you telling the story from a first person perspective or as a narrative ?

Ah. That's a good question, and allows me to bludgeon you lot with some jargon.

There are, of course, a variety of ways to tell a story: first person, second person, third person limited and third person omniscient (which I do believe is what AC meant by "narrative"). I've used all of the above at one point or another. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, which I won't go into so much here. We'll just have the short-and-sweet (or perhaps just quick-and-dirty) survey:

First person: the I's have it. You're that character for the duration. "I said, I did, I'd better not get my ass killed because that's going to end things rather abruptly, innit?" That's the perspective Sue Grafton writes in, and why it was so funny when an interviewer once turned to her after asking Tony Hillerman if he would ever kill off one of his popular main characters and asked her the same thing. As related by my best friend, her answer was a derisive snort. "Yeah, right. I write in the first person. Like I'm gonna write, 'So I turned the corner and ack-'"

I've seen writers pull it off, but it's not recommended.

Second person: You are the story. "You said, you did, you might just get your arse killed but it would be almost as awkward as 'I turned the corner and ack.'" This is an incredibly hard viewpoint to pull off, because you're putting the reader directly into the story. Readers can distance them from "I raped a nun" or "He raped a nun." Not so easy when it's "You raped a nun." Second person is, understandably, rather rare in fiction, especially long-form, but many talented writers have made it work very well indeed.

Third person omniscient: Everybody's involved. The writer is a godlike being who can leap into the minds of anyone and everyone at will. The writer is the narrator, and that means the reader gets to know things the characters don't, hear everybody's thoughts, and often get the writer's musings directly on life, the universe and everything. The majority of fiction prior to the 20th Century was written this way. You'd often get chapters' worth of the writer stopping the story dead to opine on some subject near-and-dear to them. Think the cetacean chapters in Moby Dick. There's a lot of freedom in this viewpoint, and beginning writers love it almost as much as they love first person, but you also run the risk of ending up with a pedantic mess.

Third person limited: He said, she said - and that's it. It's a lot like writing first person, actually, in that you're limited to one head at a time, but the difference is that you can narrate from a variety of viewpoint characters. Spend a few chapters with Bob here, another few with Mary there, and so forth. When you're in their viewpoints, you're strictly limited to what they're seeing, thinking, doing and knowing. Also, no switching horses mid-stream: if you begin a scene in Bob's head, you don't finish it in Mary's, no matter how interesting her thoughts in regards to Bob's bastardry might be.

It's a supremely challenging perspective to write from, and the one I use most often. That's the POV for the story I'm writing now. It's why I can't use the word "chocolate" instead of "brown," and why metaphors are giving me fits.

Now, some writers aren't as strict as I am. They'll fudge the details and trust their readers to forgive them. "All right, so Jiahrkah wouldn't use a word like 'chocolate' to describe that rich brown color, but who cares? It gets the point across. I can always just say there's an Athesean foodstuff like chocolate, and that's the way this is translated."

Not me.

Oh, hell no.

I have to torture myself with, "Bu-bu-but he wouldn't think that!" It's an unfortunate fact that he'll sometimes think in ways that my readers have no experience with. When that happens, I either translate into something plain, like the boring description "dark brown," or I'm stuck trying to sneak in an explanation of what he means by the term he'd actually use. In a short story, I don't have room to introduce the brown item earlier so that the reader understands the word later. So it goes.

You wouldn't believe how many turns-of-phrase and common descriptions are biased by our experience. I've had to stop myself a thousand times, thinking, "Wait just a fucking minute. He doesn't have hands. So why would he say something like, 'On the other hand...'?" Even things as innocuous as smiles and laughs become a challenge. An equine doesn't smile like we do, doesn't laugh like we do, and so I have to reach for a description, whereas with a human character, I can just say, "He grinned and laughed."

The further challenge is that there's not one single, solitary Earthling in this story. So I can't take the coward's way out and narrarate from the viewpoint of someone just-like-us. It's even bothering me that my alien characters think a lot like us, but that's the conceit I'm having to go with in order to tell the stories I want to tell: sentient beings are, at core, remarkably similar in basic thought patterns. Why wouldn't they be? All social animals would have the same broad concerns. Or so the story goes.

It would damned sure be easier if I wrote this from the third person omniscient POV, so that I could be that Earthling among aliens, describing things with familiar analogies. But I'll tell you why I don't do that. First, it separates the reader from the story. Second, it wouldn't be half as much fun.

Good thing I like a challenge, innit?

Biden's Up. Unleash the GOP Attack Dogs

Obama's announced his running mate. If you've been living in a box and haven't heard the news yet, it's Sen. Joe Biden.

The GOP already has their attack machine calibrated, as Digby reported yesterday:

Anyway, if it is Biden, here's the opening salvo from the GOP:

GOP Eyes Obama-Biden Split on War Funding

ABC News' Teddy Davis, Arnab Datta, and Rigel Anderson Report: The GOP is planning to step up its attacks on Barack Obama's war funding record if the presumptive Democratic nominee taps Joe Biden to be his running mate.

"Our argument will be that the Biden pick only underscores how inexperienced Barack Obama knows he is," a Republican official told ABC News, previewing the GOP's possible line of attack. "Obama's vote against funding our troops was an example of inexperience and poor judgment. The fact that his more experienced running mate made the right call highlights Obama's mistake."

"Whereas to date that vote hasn't gotten a lot of attention," the Republican official added, "now it will."

Obama national security spokesperson Wendy Morigi declined to comment when contacted by ABC News, saying, "We're not commenting on any aspect of any potential V.P."

Biden, who serves as chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, is not the only vice presidential prospect who was at odds with Obama on the May 24, 2007 war funding vote.

[snip]

Biden, however, is seen by Republicans as offering more ammunition on the war funding issue.

That's because Biden, as a former White House hopeful and staple on the Sunday morning talk shows, has been more pointed than any other Democrat in contrasting his views on war funding votes with those of Obama.

They didn't waste any time. This is what greeted me the instant I pulled up my Yahoo mail:

Glorious how the AP leaps to repeat Republicon talking points, innit?

Well, let the Right Wing Noise Machine and the gasbags yawp. They're going to be slinging their mud at a man who, shall we say, has plenty of ground to stand on:

Here are some good things about the match. He's Irish Catholic which is useful for the key state of Pennsylvania and the surrounding contested areas. He has international experience though his experience didn't stop him from voting for the Iraq war, something the "inexperienced" Obama had the judgment to avoid. He overcame personal tragedy, the death of his wife and one child.

Biden has a son in the military, a JAG about to be sent into the war. He's a good attack dog who can help with blue collar voters, at the same time he's reassuring to business community. Perhaps most importantly he's a known quantity, with no drama other other than the ancient plagiarism which MoDo reported. Add to that experience with Constitutional issues that overlap with Obama's interest in restoring some sanity in the government.

He's also not afraid to go for the throat, I hear. This is good. What with Obama's campaign getting good with the knife-twisting lately, I think this could lead to some very interesting times indeed. I'd rather he'd picked a more progressive, less traditional VP, but this'll do. I think this signals to the Republicons that Obama's not going to fight dirty, but he's sure as fuck not going to fight nice.

The Republicon attack dogs, for all their anticipation, are going to have a tough time getting their teeth into this one.

What You Mean "We," White Man?

John McCain's latest effort to convince ordinary people he's Just Like Them:

Hilariously, the McCain campaign put together a new ad today as well, and it opens with - I kid you not - "Celebrities don't have to worry about family budgets, but we do."

We?

What's this "we" shit, John?

This is "we:"


This is you:


We:


You:


We:



You:



The median American income is roughly $32,000. That's "we." And you?

McCain's net worth is $36 million dollars, almost 40 times that of Obama. McCain has butlers. BUTLERS! The John McCain Show had 9-car entourage at Starbucks to pick up a latte yesterday.

Let's have no more talk of "we."

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Stupid Faux News tricks:

The right-wing American Issues Project has spent $2.8 million on an ad questioning Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) relationship to William Ayers, a founder of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground. American Issues Project had hoped to air the controversial ad on Fox News, but even the conservative network refused, reportedly wanting nothing to do with it:

American Issues Project, the sponsor of the ad, is a nonprofit 501(c)4 organization. One of its board members, Ed Failor Jr., was a paid consultant for McCain’s campaign in Iowa last year. The campaign paid his firm $50,000 until July 2007. American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said Failor has no connection to the McCain campaign now.

Organizers sought to air the ad on Fox News Channel, but a Fox spokesman said the network declined to run it. He would not say why.

This principled stand fell by the wayside today when Fox News accidentally aired the most of the ad. During a segment about Obama’s ties to Tony Rezko, Fox News attempted to play McCain’s latest ad on the subject. However, the Ayers ad began playing instead.

It's an interesting new avenue of prestidigitation: pretend to for once do the right thing by refusing a lying, deplorable, despicable attack ad, then air it "accidentally" to ensure it gets maximum attention. Good one, Faux. That's within spitting distance of clever, even if it's several continents away from responsible.

Either that, or they really did fuck up and run the wrong ad. In which case, they could be in for a world of legal hurt. I've heard this thing seriously breaks a law or two (you see, it's not Faux taking a principled stand regardless: it's ass-covering, pure and simple).

Heh. Speaking of ass-covering...

The Senate Democratic leadership is asking, "How close can we get to 60 seats?" The Senate Republican leadership is asking, "Why isn't anyone giving us money?" Subscription-only Roll Call reports today:

In a stunning admission, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Ensign (Nev.) on Friday morning blasted his GOP colleagues for not doing enough to help the committee financially, and he said he would have to scale back the NRSC's independent expenditure budget as a result. [...]

For months Ensign has pushed his colleagues to cough up more funding to help eat away at Democrats' money advantage, and has repeatedly complained that Republicans in the Senate have taken a dangerously nonchalant approach to the 2008 cycle.

It sounds they're not expecting to do particularly well.

Noper. Seems like they are, in fact, expecting to get kicked firmly in the teeth. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch, says I.

Steve Benen points out, and I agree, that Ensign is likely issuing press releases slamming Republicons to pony up more cash because he wants to be able to say "Not my fault! Not my fault!" when the party crashes and burns this fall. This won't help him when the GOP comes looking for a scapegoat, mind, but it's a spirited attempt.

In further ass-covering news, the McLame Teme wants us to know that if Obama suddenly skyrockets in the polls, it'll have absolutely nothing to do with his being the more qualified, sane, intelligent, savvy and charismatic candidate. Nosiree, it'll be on account of all that thar attention:

With the Democratic convention poised to begin, the McCain campaign has begun spinning furiously, ratcheting up expectations to a comical level. From a memo released this afternoon:

Obama's stadium address on Thursday -- the 45th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech -- will result in effusive and overwhelming press coverage. On Thursday, Obama will give a great speech, as has been his trademark. The press will sing his praises and remark on his historic address and Obama's place in history. For example, The Associated Press today published an article comparing the historic nature of the addresses -- a week before Obama's speech. This coverage will be impenetrable and will undoubtedly impact the polls.

We believe Obama will see a significant bump, and believe it is reasonable to expect nearly a 15-point bounce out of a convention in this political environment.

First, by hitting media coverage before it happens, the McCain campaign obviously hopes to discourage reporters from noting the fact that Obama's speech falls on the anniversary of the MLK speech. I suspect this won't work.

Second, trying to set expectations for an absurd 15-point bounce is overkill.

Not with the general fucking cluelessness of the American electorate, no, we're not going to see the poll numbers diverge quite that spectacularly. But I think we'll see a few more folks get ye olde clue-by-four upside the head next week.

But that's not the bit of this I found hysterical. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how McCain gets the sulks whenever someone else becomes the MSM's darling? He's like one of those uber-pathetic children always jumping up and down screaming "MEMEME!!" and throwing a tantrum whenever Mommy pays two seconds of attention to another sibling. Poor widdle Johnny.

(Hear him blame this on being a POW in three...two...one...)

Turns out I'm not the only one getting bloody annoyed at St. John's claiming POW status as an exemption from absolutely everything, either:

After all of this, for the first time, McCain is actually starting to face some media push-back.

Once a remarkable and respected aspect of his biography, John McCain stands on the brink of "trivializing" his past as a prisoner of war, which has become a "crutch in the campaign," Newsweek's Howard Fineman declared Thursday.

"I think they are going to it way too many times. It's the original story that defined John McCain, that still when you read it in his book 'Faith of my Fathers,' when you read about it in 'The Nightingale's Song,' you can't help but have admiration and respect for the guy. And I think he wisely for many years stayed away from it as a political tool, he really did. But now it not only defines him, it's become a crutch in the campaign. And I think he is in danger of trivializing it. By the time they get to the convention in St. Paul, there might not be much of it left to use."

It's not just Fineman. Time's Ana Marie Cox went so far as to argue that McCain's over-reliance on this is "bordering on irrational."

You know what? I think the shine's starting to rub off. And we know what the MSM's like: if it ain't shiny, they ain't interested. I can hardly wait to see the bloody screaming tantrums little Johnny's gonna throw now.

But for right now, he's too busy being confused about what "drinking the kool-aid" really means:

In an AP article on how Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is supposedly a “rebel with a cause” who “chases the presidency,” former Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee (RI) “compromised his credibility” by shifting his position on issues in order to reach out to the right. Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE) agrees, saying that “he appears to be something different than what he was.”

But McCain dismisses any claims that he’s changed positions, telling the AP “in all due respect” that his former colleagues are “drinking the Kool-Aid“:

McCain bats away that notion.

“In all due respect to my colleagues,” he says, “They’re drinking the Kool-Aid that somehow I have changed positions on the issues. All I can say is that we all grow. We all grow wiser. And we all refine our positions.”

McCain points to his support for the surge in troops to Iraq, far from popular at its inception last year, as evidence he’s unafraid to swim against the tide.

McCain’s claim stretches all credibility. As Steve Benen has documented, McCain has flip-flopped at least 74 times over the years.

That's some serious fucking refinement, that is.

I smell a sea-change coming. I think the MSM's going to start "refining its position" on McLame. They're making a tentative effort by questioning just how many times one lame-ass politician can scream POW!!11! before it gets absurd. Perhaps they'll stumble on the flip-flop list. Then possibly realize that McCain's been a lying, cheating, vicious sack of shit all along.

Or maybe he'll throw another barbecue, and we'll lose this moment forever. At least we had a glimpse.

A Sign of Hope?

It's possible, just minutely possible, that the religious right's pushed faith too far:

About a week ago, at the candidate forum at Saddleback Church, the Rev. Rick Warren kicked off the event with a fairly straightforward message: "We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics."

As it turns out, a growing number of Americans disagree.

For the first time in more than a decade, a narrow majority of Americans say churches should stay out of politics, according to a poll released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The results suggest a potentially significant shift among conservative voters in particular. In 2004, 30% of conservatives said the church should stay out of politics while today 50% of conservatives today express that view.

Conservatives are now more in line with moderates and liberals when it comes to their views on mixing religion and politics. "Similarly, the sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats that previously existed on this issue have disappeared," Pew reports.

The results are encouraging, and more than a little surprising. In the decade between 1996 and 2006, Pew Forum surveys showed a stable trend -- a narrow majority of Americans wanted houses of worship to be publicly engaged in policy debates. Now, the numbers have reversed, and a narrow majority wants ministries to "stay out."

About damned time. Now, if only this trend would continue...

Religion and politics have no business mixing the way they have in this country. Time to rebuild that wall, atheist and religious folks alike, before one narrow religious view manages to rip it down completely, and take the country down with them.

The Things I Miss by Not Checking Email - Or Keeping Up on Me Blog Reading

NP welcomes a glorious new niece. Shall we all join her in turning into enormous piles of sappy mush?

What the fuck is it about babies that does this even to those of us who don't even like the little buggers? Resistance... fading... must... reach... catidote...



Ahhh. Better. Wouldn't do to damage me tough, Smack-o-Matic swinging reputation by ga-gaaing too much over a baby, but cats is allowed for us merciless political bloggers.

That said... that is a damned cute kid, innit?

Salud, Ashlie Elizabeth! Feliz cumpleaños!

Friday Favorite Quotations

I'm apparently not a freak of nature for loving quotations so much. There's a plethora of websites and many hefty tomes devoted to nothing but the snappy sentences of other people. Which is good, because I need an assload o' quotes.

You see, I'm a quote junkie. Always have been. It's part of my writing. I'll spend the entire damned night looking for the right quote for a story or chapter. I've outlined stories using nothing but quotes from songs. A good part of my reading involves marking off things that will make pithy quotes later on.

Quotes are there when I need them. There's been many a day when a quote rescued me from becoming a sad pile of human wreckage hiding under the covers. They've been there to lend zip and zing to a whimsical day. They've been there to show me a new direction. And they've been there to say exactly what I want to say without having to take the blame.

Allow me to share with you some of my absolute favorites.

Profound and Perilous

There are some quotes that work like a punch to the gut. They may not be comfortable or comforting, but they do make you think.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore
-Golda Meir

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives
-Albert Einstein

The very bones of those you talk about have turned to dust. All that remains of them is their words.
-Lao Tzu

You see this strong wall? Although it understands nothing, it too will disintegrate, it too will split. Disintegration has a logic of its own.
-Berl Katznelson

It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil."
-Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

I found myself looking at the photos of combat, of wounded civillians, of people whose worlds had crumbled and fallen, without any sense of irony. These people were us. Whatever side they were on. They were us, and the images had a truth and an immediacy I couldn't have imagined until recently.
-Neil Gaiman, after viewing an exhibition of Robert Capa's war photographs after 9-11

A Stiff Shot of Encouragement

We could use some after the above, couldn't we?

Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.
-Homer, The Iliad

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
-Elie Wiesel

Fall seven times, stand up eight.
-Japanese Proverb

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
-Confucius

Heroism, the Caucasion moutaineers say, is endurance for one moment more.
-George Keenan

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection.
-Thomas Paine

Sheer Beauty

There are some quotes that fill the mouth like wine, like honey, like life. They beg to be savored.

At poor peace I sing
to you strangers (though song
is a burning and crested act...)
-Dylan Thomas, Author’s Prologue

We do not regard what is before our feet; we all gaze at the stars.
-Quinas Ennius

It isn't "To be or not to be,"
Or "Cogito ergo sum" either;
The real business is to understand the inevitable:
The avalanche that cannot be stopped,
The stream that flows forever.
-Ahmed Arif

Thus should you think of all this fleeting world;
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud
A flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.
-Diamond Sutra

Why don't you come
And help create the universe.
I can't do this all by myself.
-Nida Fazali

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
-Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Wit and Whimsy

A sense of humor being essential to the full enjoyment of life, I think we should end this not with a bang, but a fullisade of whoopie cushions.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
-E.B. White

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
-Muhammed Ali

Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.
-Xenophon

...No scientist on Earth knows how a planet might blow itself up, which is probably just as well.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one.
-Archilochus, Iambi et Elgi Graeci

Wonderful theory. Wrong species.
-E.O. Wilson (verdict on Marxism)

Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.
-The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior

The heavens above do not equal one half of me.... In my glory, I have passed beyond the sky and the great earth... I will pick up the earth, and put it here or put it there.... Have I been drinking soma?
-Rig Veda

Your turn, my darlings. What are the words that lodge in your head and refuse to be budged?

Beyond Ridiculous

I wrote a post last night about McCain's obnoxious habit of using his status as a POW to evade every scrap of criticism and create himself as some kind of astonishing expert in, well, everything. I figured I'd wait until the inevitable next time he trots out the POW pony to post it.

I underestimated his crassness. I figured it'd take him several days. It didn't:

The initial response from the McCain campaign on the senator’s confusion about how many homes he owns was pretty weak. Put it this way, it talked about arugula and Hawaii.

A couple of hours later, though, the McCain gang went with the one response that applies to every question.

The McCain campaign is road-testing a new argument in responding to Obama’s criticism of his number-of-houses gaffe, an approach the McCain camp has never tried before: The houses gaffe doesn’t matter because … he was a P.O.W.!

“This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

I see. When the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s marital infidelities, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war.

When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war.

Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

Accused of possibly having heard the questions in advance of Rick Warren’s recent candidate forum, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war.

There seems to be a pattern here.

There is indeed. It's gotten pathological, and it's infuriating, and it's time for it to stop. There's a fine line between informing and exploiting. McCain's so deep into exploitation territory he can't even see the line now.

Giuliani had 9-11 Tourette's. McCain's got the same thing with POW. I just hope the similarities won't end there.

I'll be posting my smackdown on Monday. Why start the weekend with a quick shot of outrage when we can save it for the long, slow burn? I'm sure he'll have ridden the POW pony to the well of excuses a few more times by then, so the piece will still be topical.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Well, well. Looks like the fox shall be guarding the henhouse:

Hans von Spakovsky, as a top political appointee in Bush’s Justice Department, was a leading player in what has been labeled the administration’s “vote-suppression agenda.”

When it came to voter disenfranchisement, von Spakovsky was a reliable member of Team Bush. And as a reward, Bush tried to promote von Spakovsky to a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which touched off a major fight with Senate Democrats, and in turn, effectively shut down the FEC for months.

In May, Dems won when Spakovsky withdrew from consideration. In August, Americans lost, as Spakovsky was hired as a “consultant” to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

If Spakovsky’s history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission’s mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky’s duties will be overseeing the USCCR’s report on the Justice Department’s monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky’s hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government’s highest payscale — which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.

This is crazy. The guy who was accused of voter-suppression tactics has no business “helping” monitor to the elections on behalf of the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Crazy, indeed. I think this speaks volumes about how Republicons plan to win the election this November. Stay sharp, and have the number to your local elections commission handy.

McCain's running for Bush's third term in all but name. Now, he's not even bothering to deny it:

John McCain has struggled for a long while to explain the ways in which he’s different from George W. Bush. He wasn’t asked the question much during the Republican primaries, but in recent months, it’s been an awkward subject for him.

For a while, McCain would tell anyone who asked about the differences that he disagrees with Bush on pork-barrel spending. Then he’d argue that McCain takes global warming more seriously than Bush does.

Now, he’s decided to hardly answer the question at all, telling the Politico, “I don’t have any need to show that I’m different than President Bush.”

Actually, in an environment in which voters are desperate for some kind of change in how the government operates, McCain absolutely needs to show how he’s different from Bush. If he’s not going to try, I’m delighted to hear it.

Well, I refer you to the previous entry to decide whether McCain feels any pressing need to campaign effectively, or whether he's counting on good ol' Republicon dirty tricks to win him the election.

Dirty tricks - and racism. Limbaugh continues pushing the meme today, no longer ashamed of being an open racist:

Continuing his race-based attacks from the day before, Rush Limbaugh declared yesterday that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) success so far is because people “can’t criticize the little black man-child:”

LIMBAUGH: It’s — you know, it’s just — it’s just we can’t hit the girl. I don’t care how far feminism’s saying, you can’t hit the girl, and you can’t — you can’t criticize the little black man-child. You just can’t do it, ’cause it’s just not right. It’s not fair. He’s such a victim.

I used to think we lived in a country where vile, openly racist statements such as these could only be made by rabidly insane assclowns on the outermost fringes of our society. I believed that anyone making statements like this on a fucking radio show broadcast nationwide would find his career handed to him with a stake through it. I think we all remember what happened to Don Imus for that "nappy-headed hos" debacle.

So why the fuck is Rush Limbaugh still on the air? Has America fallen that far since last year?

It's not like the media's going to call him out on this. The media's too shit-scared of the rabid right, and besides, they're too busy defending their good barbecue buddy McCain:

During a townhall meeting yesterday, an audience member asked a long-winded question that ended with a call to enact the military draft in order to “chase bin Laden to the gates of Hell.” McCain immediately replied, “I don’t disagree with anything you said.”

Brushing off his instant response, some journalists are refusing to take McCain’s statement at face value. “Does McCain favor a draft? Nope,” the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote on his blog yesterday, deriding liberals for “having a conniption.” When asked about the quote last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd declared he was going to “give McCain the benefit of the doubt,” unbelievably claiming McCain was simply advocating some form of national service:

TODD: Let me just go there and give McCain the benefit of the doubt as to what he might have thought he was agreeing to. Which is that he has been a big advocate on the national service front, as has Obama, as sort of mandatory service in some form, that you see a lot of politicians take. So it is possible that that’s what he was talking about.

No. It wasn't. And as many have pointed out, there's no other way for McCain to have the wars he wants than to reinstate the draft. He wants us all serving in the military. He wants this country to become nothing more than a war machine.

He wants war, we should give him war. It's time to start an all-out offensive. We need to find a way to make sure that the world knows what a disaster McCain would be.

Break Out the Bubbly

Sometimes, good people really do get the recognition they deserve.

First up, one of my favorite bloggers of all time, Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report, got snapped up by the Washington Monthly:

Now that my friend Kevin Drum has made the announcement, I can pass along the big news.

Starting this Friday, Aug. 22, Kevin will be leaving the Washington Monthly, heading over to a new blog at Mother Jones. He’ll be replaced at Political Animal by … me.

Yes, five-and-a-half years and more than 16,000 posts later, I’m giving up The Carpetbagger Report to blog exclusively for the Washington Monthly. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity.

For years, I had this idea in mind — start a site, work hard, build an audience, and wait for some wonderful news outlet to come along and hire me. Given this, and my love for the Washington Monthly (which I’ve been reading assiduously since I was an undergrad), I’m genuinely thrilled. Joining me at Political Animal will be Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, who, as one of my very favorite bloggers, only makes the news even better.

For Carpetbagger readers, the only thing that’s going to change is the url and the layout. I’m going to keep doing exactly what I’m doing now; just update your bookmarks and follow me to my new home.

My first day at the Monthly is this Friday, Aug. 22. The schedule will remain the same until then, but starting Friday morning, I’ll be posting full-time at Political Animal. Hope to see you there.

As you all know, without Steve, there wouldn't be a Happy Hour Discurso. You can bet your fucking bippy I'll be there!

(Question: does anyone here know what, exactly, a bippy is?)

Steve's one of the hardest-working bloggers in the known universe. He's also one of the funniest, kindest, and competent. He's earned this, and I'm absolutely thrilled for him.

Kevin Drum had just better keep up the Friday Catblogging tradition over at Mother Jones, or I'm going to have to buy Steve two cats and a camera to compensate.

Steve's not the only deserving person who got a better gig. MSNBC did the right thing and gave Rachel Maddow a show. I don't watch television anymore - I barely manage to catch me some Daily Show and Colbert Report from time to time - but I might have to make an exception:

I’m very rarely encouraged by any of the decisions made by major news outlets. Yesterday afternoon, however, was a spectacular exception.

Rachel Maddow has been sounding off about politics on MSNBC so often she might as well have her own show.

And now she does.

The liberal commentator and Air America radio host, who has become a breakout star for the cable channel during the presidential campaign, is taking over the 9 p.m. slot following Keith Olbermann, whom she often subs for on “Countdown.” Olbermann broke what he called a “fully authorized leak” yesterday on the left-wing Web site Daily Kos. Dan Abrams, the former MSNBC general manager who had been hosting “Verdict” at that hour, will continue as NBC’s chief legal correspondent, become a “Dateline” contributor and serve as a daytime anchor for MSNBC.

A recent profile of Rachel in the Nation noted, “Maddow didn’t get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.”

I’d just add that Rachel is, without doubt or hesitation, the best political observer on television, and her insightful analysis of the 2008 cycle has set a very high bar for the rest of the media to follow. The question hasn’t been whether Rachel would get her own prime-time show; the question has been why Rachel didn’t already have her own prime-time show.

That would be because the media moguls are fucking morons. It's good to see them wising up a bit.

So, my darlings, raise your glasses high to two of the best people in political reporting. Salud!

Surely You Jest, Sen. McCain!

That McCain. Always ready with a lame joke at someone else's expense. Guy's a groan a minute - he should go into improv.

Get a load of his latest schtick:

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called lobbyists “birds of prey” Wednesday and vowed to enforce a lifetime ban on lobbying for members of his administration.

“Whenever there’s a corrupt system, then you’re going to have these birds of prey descend on it to get their share of the spoils,” McCain said in a half-hour interview with Politico following a town-hall meeting in the southern part of this swing state.

Ha ha ha ha ha! Ho ho hee hee *snort* heh. That's a good one, John. That's really fucking hilarious! Because we all know you in actual fact love lobbyists:

In that same interview, McCain said "lobbyists don't come to my office." Maybe that's because they're too busy working for his campaign. According to reports, at least 150 lobbyists are working for and raising money for his campaign, including campaign manager Rick Davis, senior advisor Charlie Black, top foreign policy advisory Randy Scheunemann, and McCain's handpicked Deputy Chair of the Republican National Committee Frank Donatelli. No wonder John McCain bragged in his 2002 book that he "can claim with gratitude a good number of lobbyists as friends and supporters." In fact, the John McCain who called lobbyists "birds of prey" today called lobbying "an honorable profession" in 2005.

Poor News Blaze. They just didn't get the joke, did they?

But McCain still has 115 lobbyists raising money and helping to run his campaign. And apparently, they all understand McCain’s anti-lobbyist efforts are simply for show:

At 4 p.m. Monday, campaign finance chair Susan Nelson convened a conference call with lobbyist supporters and fundraisers to assuage their bruised egos and pass along positive polling data, according to two participants in the session.

“I think they were trying to make the point that this is not an attack on lobbying or any of the people on the campaign,” said one participant in the conference call, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They want to move forward. My sense is everyone gets the joke.”

See? We've all known since May, when poor Johnny had to purge a few of his lobbyists to make it look good for the yokels, that he's just joshing when he bashes lobbyists. It's all in good fun.

After all, without his lobbyists, Johnny wouldn't even have a campaign:

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Looks like Limbaugh is going for the open racism:

Yesterday on his radio show, right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh said it’s “striking how unqualified Obama is and how this whole thing came about within the Democrat Party. I think it really goes back to the fact
that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy.” Limbaugh continued:

I think this is a classic illustration here where affirmative action has reared its ugly head against them. It’s the reverse of it. They’ve, they’ve ended up nominating and placing at the top of their ticket somebody who’s not qualified, who has not earned it. […]

Because we all know that a black man can't possibly win a nomination because people think his qualifications are just fine. Noper. Gotta be that affirmative action.

Hey, Lamebaugh, newflash for you: Obama won the nomination because he's got popular policy ideas, he was right on the Iraq war, his foreign policy makes so much sense that even the Bush regime is quietly thieving elements of it, because he's eloquent, and because he gives us hope. If that's affirmative action, it makes a fuck of a lot of sense to me. I'll take it.

Expect more of this shit. Neocons will attack anything and anyone, use every dirty trick in the book, and employ outrageous double-standards to get their way. Just look at what they're doing to a Republican Vietnam veteran, for fuck's sake:

Today on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, a caller questioned Vets for Freedom (VFF) founder David Bellavia about the group’s attacks on Vietnam veteran Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE). Bellavia quickly praised Hagel, saying he was a “patriot.” “You don’t question another man’s service,” said Bellavia.” “I will never attack a Vietnam veteran, like some of these other individuals have during this political season.”

Content he paid enough lip-service to Hagel, he then began attacking the senator, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. Bellavia’s dismissed the Hagel’s service in Vietnam — for which he earned a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge — as irrelevant to the current conflict:

BELLAVIA: Sen. Hagel has never been shot at in Iraq, he’s never seen what an IED looks like or been detonated on. This is an individual that could embed himself instead of doing a two-day congressional delegation. Go out there, walk with the troops, see what’s going on on the ground. […]

Now, again, with Sen. Hagel — my problem with Sen. Hagel is, again, his experienced is based on what? The Mekong Delta. It’s based to Vietnam, a totally different fight, a totally different enemy, and by the way, it was 30 years ago.

Fascinating. Senator Hagel's Vietnam experience was "30 years ago" and is "completely irrelevant." Let's just take that at face value, shall we? If that's the case, then John McCain's Vietnam service, his status as a POW all those years ago, all of that's "completely irrelevant." And that might help explain why McLame's foreign policy and ideas on the current wars are so incredibly bad.

If you're going to attack a Vietnam vet on his service, you neocons, be very careful how you do it, or it's going to blow back and take your heads off. Guaranteed. And I'll enjoy the sight more than I can possibly say.

We can't expect much more than this sort of schlock from the Party of Hypocrites. Just check out who's delivering their keynote speech at the Republicon convention: Rudy "The state pays for my affairs" Giuliani. Carpetbagger makes an excellent point:

It’s been a while, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Giuliani ran one of the more embarrassing presidential campaigns in recent memory and lost every contest in which he competed, usually by enormous margins. He invested millions and ended up without a single delegate.

The rationale behind giving Giuliani this high-profile slot is … well, I’m not quite sure what the rationale is. Maybe the McCain gang decided they haven’t heard “9/11″ and “stay on offense” quite enough.

Just to provide some additional context, though, Jonathan Stein raises an interesting point: “John Edwards cheated on his wife. The media found out about it. John Edwards will not be attending the Democratic convention. Rudy Giuliani used public funds to cheat on his wife and used city agencies to cover his tracks. The media found out about it. Rudy Giuliani will be delivering the keynote at the Republican convention.”

It is odd. Spitzer and Edwards get caught having affairs, and their careers are finished in Democratic politics. Giuliani and Gingrich get caught having affairs, and they remain high-profile Republicans in good standing. Hmm.

Hmm, indeed. I think that says all we'll ever need to know about the party of "family values."

And finally, for your viewing pleasure, here's McCain taking dead aim at both of his feet and preparing to pull the trigger:

At first blush, this report in the New York Sun seems to have very little relevance to the presidential campaign.

Republican or Democrat, will make a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement a priority only if the two sides, meeting now in Turkey, make substantial progress before the inauguration.

That is what a foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama told Syria’s foreign minister last month while on a visit to Damascus. While the trip was not connected to the Obama campaign, Daniel Kurtzer nonetheless provided Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem with some advice of his own.

“I urged him to move ahead in the Israel-Syria negotiations as much as possible so that whoever is the next president would not start from too far down the track,” Mr. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said yesterday in a phone interview. “I did not say anything about Obama or McCain. I said whoever is the next president is not going to want to inherit a process that isn’t going anywhere.”

Kurtzer was in Damascus for a law conference, he wasn’t representing Obama in any way, he isn’t even a paid member of Obama’s staff, and he’s in no way authorized by anyone to engage in any kind of official diplomacy a foreign government. He’s just a former ambassador with some friendly (and fairly obvious) words of advice for Syrian officials.

Nevertheless, a McCain campaign source told Greg Sargent the Republican campaign is poised to jump on this as evidence of … well, something nefarious. Indeed, it appears that Rudy Giuliani will help lead the outraged mob, which will denounce “an Obama campaign Middle East adviser” traveling to Damascus “for meetings with Syrian officials.”

Carpetbagger explains why this would be an awesome thing for McCain to do. By all means, attack on this front. We could use the entertainment.

Republicons. They just get more ridiculous every day, don't they?

B-B-But He Was a PRISONER of WAR!!11!1!

Oh, for fuck's sake:

For several weeks I've been issuing joking disclaimers that my criticisms of McCain on completely unrelated subjects should not be considered an attack on his service in Vietnam. (I did it earlier today.) It never occurred to me that they'd actually go there but, apparently, the suggestion that McCain might have heard the questions before he appeared on stage at the Saddleback event --- because he wasn't in a "cone of silence" after all --- is impugning his integrity as a POW. For real:

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Oh, yeah, right. He can't fucking cheat because he was a fucking prisoner of war, which as we all know turns people into perfect fucking saints.

If that's the case, why are we so fucking worried about the poor bastards rotting in Gitmo? They should be bloody angels by now. But I digress.

The best damned thing that ever happened to McCain was getting tossed in the Hanoi Hilton. Seriously. It's like a magic spell: "But he was a prisoner of war." Ting! Justlikethat, whatever stupid, evil, dishonest fuckery he's been up to gets magicked right away. Heaven forfend some asshole blogger should ever doubt the super-duper powers of the POW wand:

To be sure, it’s obvious that McCain’s detention as a young man in Vietnam helped shape his life, and it’s not unreasonable that he’d want voters to know about his experience.

But that’s not a license to force the “P.O.W. card” into every unrelated question.

Last week, when the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s character, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war. When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war. Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

And all of this, of course, dovetails with the McCain campaign running multiple television ads talking about McCain’s background as a prisoner of war, literally including interrogation footage in the commercial.

You know something? I'm so sick of this bullshit I'm about to explode. Because while Carpetbagger and Digby and you and me understand that having been unlucky (or incompetent) enough to be shot down and captured does not instantly make a person into a foreign policy expert with leadership qualities out the wazoo, others apparently fall for this shit. They're so intimidated by the myth their brains just shut down when they hear the letters POW.

You know what? Mine doesn't. This is how much respect I have for John's magic letters: Surviving the experience with mind intact was, no doubt, an accomplishment. Bravo, John. Now shut the fuck up.

Because this is just crass. Real heroes don't strut around wearing their POW status like a medal. They don't hide snivelling behind it every time they get caught doing something wrong. Real leaders do not need to use their wartime victimization as a crutch to prop up their empty bag of a campaign.

Got that, Johnny?

And I fucking dare, oh, I fucking triple-dog dare, you rabid fuckers to come after me. You know who you are. You're the ones as sensitive as an open nerve when it comes to the slightest hint of tarnish on St. John's aluminum armor. You're the ones who scream and stamp your feet and demand the heads of everyone who has the guts to call bullshit when McLame starts whining about how being a POW puts him beyond any and all criticism.

Go right the fuck ahead. Bring it on.

Let's see how good you look attacking a rape survivor. I'm so ready to play that game.

I hope you brought a hat. You'll need it for your teeth.

In Which I Answer a Reader's Question, and Tell a Story About a Story

In this post, I mentioned I'd been out on the balcony smoking a cigarette when a rather astounding ethical question slammed into my poor abused brain. In the comments, MalwareBeGone asks:

Wouldn't a shot (or 4) of Tequila help with these ethical questions? Better than nicotine?

Indeed it would. A bottle, in fact, would do wonders. Only problem being, with the exception of a single story, I only ever write fiction stone fucking sober.

Nicotine and caffeine. That's the extent of my drug use. Oh, I've tried writing drunk. I can rant like no one else when I've got demon rum coursing through my veins. I can follow flights of the mind through the longest, oddest journal entries when Jose Cuervo and I are getting friendly. And it's fine stuff - barely even a typo. Coherent sentences, even.

I sit down to write fiction with a margarita to hand, however, and the damned well goes dry. I think my Muse gets jealous. Have I mentioned she's a sadist? She likes to make me suffer. And when I'm drinking, I'm not suffering - I'm an effusively cheerful drunk.

Now imagine my surprise when I ran across a story I couldn't write sober.

Many years ago, in the afterglow of a Circus Mexicus, I'd sat down at my desk with a pitcher of margaritas. Didn't intend to write any fiction. Just intended to get drunk. Really drunk. And listen to the Peacemakers, and stare happily at a blank page whilst I dreamt of the concert in a happy haze.

A few hours later, I was staring at the beginnings of an origin story. It shocked me because a) I'd never written a damned word drunk before, b) the character in question had never struck me as a Peacemakers' fan and c) he sure as fuck hadn't struck me as a man determined to drown himself in alcohol.

Weird.

I thought it might be good. I thought that might be the alcohol talking. So I walked - well, weaved - away from it, and left it to sit overnight. It would probably look like total schlock in the harsh light of sobriety. No problemo - that's what the delete function is for.

Only. Only, when I snuck a wary peek at it sober, it actually looked good.

I spent a few days working out issues of continuity, exploring the events that had led to poor Galen drinking himself to death in Mexico, and pulling Peacemakers' quotes to build the rest of the story around. Then, with the basic trajectory of the plot firmly in mind, willfully sober, I plunked myself down to write the rest.

Lead balloons weren't even in it. The prose took flight just like an emu strapped to an anchor. The few paragraphs I managed were so wooden you could've put them through a sawmill and built a damn fine deck.

But, you know, I write sober, so I persisted for a day or so. I did not want to become the kind of author who relies on alcohol for inspiration. That way lies Hemmingway, and Hunter S. Thompson land. Or so my corseted upbringing and the self-righteous proclamations of good Mormon boy Orson Scott Card like to have me believe.

When I had enough wood to build a mansion, I deleted everything back to where I'd started writing sober and reconsidered.

Time for an experiment, then.

I mixed another pitcher.

I drank.

I wrote.

It took me, if I remember right (and mind you, this is hazy, for obvious reasons), about two or three weeks to finish the story. Did you know you can get thoroughly sick of drinking margaritas every night? And it had to be margaritas. Tried rum one night, and tanked again: this story demanded tequila, specifically.

I went through a fuck of a lot of tequila.

The only part of the story I wrote semi-sober was the end, where Galen's sobering up himself. I realized I'd had to follow his trajectory to get this one right. And it worked. Aside from some awkwardness when fangirldom hijacked the story (part of it takes place at the Peacemakers' Circus Mexicus show), it all flowed just right. I adore that story. Someday, an editor will, too.

But that's the only one. I've never written another story drunk. A scene, here or there, but never a whole and entire story. Not for lack of trying, mind you - I do love a good drink.

Which is precisely why I envy the fuckers who can drink like fish and write like demigods.

****

For those of you who may desire a sip from the above mentioned story: Excerpt from "Ninth Wave", by Dana Hunter.

IV.

Barkeep
We need to go around again
One for me and what’s-his-name
My new best friend
-Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, Mekong

“The bodyguard’s cardinal sin is getting involved with your client,” I tell the off-duty federale at JJ’s. “You don’t do that. But I did. But I thought I wouldn’t break the cardinal rule. See, if you do get involved, you make damned sure you keep them safe. But I didn’t. That’s why I’m here.”

He orders another round on me. “You have much guilt.”

“Damn straight.” I throw the tequila back. I’m beyond limes. The burn is sweet and pure, the only pure thing left in a defiled world. "Do you know what the Irish did to sinners? They sent them beyond the ninth wave, out of the country, bam. In a little boat. No sails, no rudder, just a knife and some water. Not salt water. Fresh. And maybe some mead. No one sent me beyond the ninth wave. I came here myself. Irwin gave me his condo, not a boat. But it's all the same thing anyway. Because I committed the cardinal sin."

"Love is no sin," he says. Sunlight from the door creeps into the dark room and washes the old wood beams and my new friend in sepia. He looks very wise, a mestizo messiah who's come down from the dry mountains to enlighten me. "Is very painful, si, but no sin. You should not feel guilty for that."

"Thank you for saying that." I lean over the scarred wooden bar and grasp his wrist, knocking my glass askew. Good thing it's empty. “Let me tell you one thing. You see red eyes out there, you get the fuck away from them. They’ll tear you apart.”

He grins. “Your mujer, she had red eyes?”

“No. Her killers did.”

He looks at me sideways. Crazy gringo. Mad drunk. Yes, I know. But I don’t want to see this man die under fang and claw some night on a lonely patrol. He’s doing a hard job, and he listened to me pour out my woes, so I grasp his wrist harder and try to make him understand. “There are bad things out there, amigo. Muy malo. Stay away from them. You may think you can shoot them with a gun, but you can't. I know. I tried. But they didn't die because they've got special protection.” Something Danika said filters through the tequila murk. "It's like a kind of force shield. Only blades get through it. So you can't kill them unless you're trained. You've got to just run."

“Si, si.” He prises my fingers away and sees the wristband. “You should go. Your concert is soon.”

Concert. Salvation. Answers. Right. I rise unsteadily. People stare at me as I weave out of the bar, an unshaven wreck of a man. I used to look at people like me with the same disgust, condemn self-pity with the same righteousness, but now I know what the relentless obsession of grief and guilt is. El federale kept me going for a few hours with his sympathies and commiserations. I just wish that a generous ear could drain the poison from the festering wound my psyche’s become.

Faux News Pwnd by 12 Year-old

I know there are people in this country who take Faux News seriously. I have no idea why:

Wow, Faux really blew it here, bringing in a 12 year old Ossetian girl "hero" to talk about how bad the Russian aggression was, first-hand, only to have the girl stop the flow of the interview and point out that her ordeal was caused by Georgian troops, and she thanks the Russians who helped her escape.

Note to Faux: the key to effective propaganda is to ensure that the children and aunts you're attempting to exploit for your agenda don't completely fucking contradict your agenda with first-hand experience. This is why you should employ something we like to call journalism to discover these little things we like to call facts.

The look of shock on that anchor's face when his carefully constructed Ruskies are eeeevvviiiiillll!!1!!11! piece started tumbling down round his ears was completely priceless. So was the "That's what the Russians want" lame-ass attempt at rescuing the situation.

How I love watching the eggs break all over Faux News's dear little faces.

For bonus fuckwittery relating to Faux News fuckups and the people who blindly believe them, see here.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

It's official. Bush has a scorched-earth policy:

F. Chase Hutto III, a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney with a long history of promoting anti-environmental regulation policy, is a top choice for a post at the Energy Department, the Washington Post reports today.

Hutto, who is being considered for the position of assistant secretary for policy and international affairs, has been a contact within the administration for the oil and gas industry on energy and environmental issues.

The administration's controversial decision to delay action on regulating greenhouse gas emissions was shaped in part by Hutto.

Highlights of this dumbass's career are here.

Bush has a perfect record of chosing the worst possible people for jobs. I'd love to get my hands on the interview questions. One of them has got to be, "Are you completely opposed to the purpose and principles of the department you want to work in?" It's like it's permanent Opposite Day at the Bush White House, and the assclown in office is doing his level best to ensure he leaves America destroyed behind him.

And then we have McLame, babbling the bullshit about offshore drilling on an oil rig. Well, let's have a look at what might be driving his determination to drill:

It should come as no surprise that the McCain chose to visit a Chevron-owned drilling platform, considering that lobbyists for Chevron both fundraise and work for his campaign:

Wayne Berman: Berman, the managing director of lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations, is McCain’s national finance co-chairman and has bundled over $500,000 dollars for his campaign. Berman has lobbied for Chevron since 2004.

John Green: Green, who also works for Oglivy, has been the McCain campaign’s chief Congressional liaison since March. Green has lobbied for Chevron since 2005.

Richard Hohlt: Hohlt, who is the leader of a group of Washington, DC insiders called the “Off the Record Club” that includes top McCain strategist Charlie Black, is a fundraiser for the McCain campaign. Holht has lobbied for Chevron since 2005.

In June, McCain went before oil executives in Texas to reverse his position on offshore
drilling and lay out a set of policy proposals that add up to a big fat kiss to Big Oil. Since
then, the oil industry has flooded McCain with money and McCain has begun promoting the advice of “the oil executives.”

Yup. Big Oil has big pockets, and McCain's happily snuggled right inside of 'em.

Continuing our delve into dirty energy, let's see what Peabody Coal's head honcho has got to say about his product:

Speaking to USA Today, Gregory Boyce, CEO of Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, “shrugged off any worries” about coal’s enormous greenhouse gas emissions or moves to make energy more environmentally friendly, declaring the U.S. would never move away from coal:

“It’s a good time to be Peabody,” says Boyce, an affable man who speaks in a confident baritone. “There’s not enough natural gas. There’s not enough renewables (such as wind and solar energy) to go around. So I’m not concerned that coal is going to disappear. For us not to use that resource, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.” […]

“There’s a perception out there that coal is dirty, and we have to change that,” he adds, noting that coal plants already have cut emissions of some pollutants and boosted efficiency to slash CO2 discharges. “Black is the new green."

My ass. Black is the new green only if we learn to live in monochrome. And develop lungs that run on dirty air. Oh, and don't mind that runaway greenhouse effect stuff. Peabody's been lying about the environmental impact of its product for generations.

The last thing this country needs is more drilling and more mining. What this country needs is a completely new energy policy that will explore clean, renewable energy. We need to enrich America, not the fat bastards who so love to rape it.

If McCain gets elected, I'm afraid that a continued assault is all we have to look forward to.

A Vote I Feel Good About

I've been so focused on national politics, keeping ye olde blog happily updated, and this bloody story that I very nearly missed the Washington State primary election. I've really got to keep better tabs on my political email.

It's a damned good thing Washington state plumps for absentee ballots, or tomorrow would've been a clusterfuck. Damned good thing my roommate put the ballot where I could find it. Especially since she's on it. This is the first time I've gotten to vote for someone I know in a statewide election. Just don't ask me what I'm voting for - I can't remember the official name of the position, but it's basically sending her off to make sure Obama plants his ass in the Oval Office.


This also marks the first election in which I am delighted to fill in the little bubble next to a politician's name. My Congressman, Jay Inslee, is up for re-election.

I've spent the entirety of this year wanting to vote for that man.

I come from Arizona, where your choice is a) a noxious Republicon or b) a Democrat without a hope in hell of winning the damned election. I've never been represented by a person who actually represented me. Then I moved up here, and started filling in petitions, and discovered what it feels like to have perfect trust in a politician.

Damned good, is how. Muy bueno. Tres bien, even.

I can trust Jay. Oh, I'll grant you, there's some things in his voting record he and I could quibble over, just as there is with any politician. For instance, that yes vote on that "Importance of Christmas and Christianity" bullroar, I could definitely give him some guff for (although he rather made up for it by voting against the National Day of Prayer). But that kind of thing pales in comparison to issues that matter. And on those, he speaks for me.

Use of Military Force Against Iraq: NO
Military Commissions Act of 2006: NO
Stem Cell Research bills: YES
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 NO

Oh, I could go on. SCHIP, Social Security, Minimum Wage, and a ton of other issues, but I haven't got time for more than some highlights. It's enough to show that on the most important issues, he's got our backs.

Whenever I sign petitions, I get long, thoughtful emails from Jay explaining his positions and thanking me for my input. I've published one here. I should publish more. All I can say is, it's pretty unique to get a little thrill of excitement when an email from a Congressman lands in my box. Other politicians for the most part just send a one or two paragraph response saying "thanks for participating in democracy, good on you, here's some pablum that won't tell you if I heard one fucking word you said and have a nice day." Not Jay. I don't get emails from him so much as treatises. I'm not left wondering if I've just been petitioning a brick wall. I know what he's thinking, and why, and then he backs that up with his vote.

You know what that makes me feel like? An adult. A valued constituent. More than just a person who can be snookered into voting. I even get the sense that if he takes a stand against an issue I'm passionate about, he'll make sure I understand why. And it will be well-reasoned, make sense, and even if we remain in disagreement, I can at least respect his position. That's purely hypothetical, o' course, because he's been right in line with my own thinking on the important stuff since I moved here.

I appreciate being represented by a good, intelligent man who truly cares about this country. He does his job very well indeed. And that's why I felt so damned good filling in that little bubble by his name. I even would've hauled my sorry arse out of bed early to vote in person if I hadn't found my absentee ballot in the nick o' time.

If Jay Inslee ever runs for President, I'll be working my ass off for his campaign. Guaranteed. And it's going to feel fantastic making sure he remains my Congressman for many years to come.

Yeah, I'm a fan of my congressman. However did you guess?

DNA Analysis PWNS Hoaxers

I don't know if you heard the super exciting news, but some utter idiots claimed they found a Bigfoot corpse.

They not only claimed they'd found a corpse, they provided tissue samples.

Something tells me they're a little fuzzy on the realities of DNA testing:

One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 percent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.

Um. Yeah. Kinda sorta debunked, don't you think?

But are these guys slinking away in shame? Oh, pshaw and pish! No really intrepid con artist is going to let a little thing like conclusive DNA results stop his fuckery, especially not when he has a guilliable spokesperson to come up with excuses:

Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.

Riiiight. This is going to be just about as kosher as that alien autopsy video, innit?

What amuses me the most about this is the transparent motive of the discoverers. See if this paragraph makes you laugh as merrily as I did:

Also present were Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two who say they discovered the Bigfoot corpse while hiking in the woods of northern Georgia. They also are co-owners of a company that offers Bigfoot merchandise.

Uh-huh. Needed to drum up some interest in the business, I see. It's just sad that, despite the embarrassment with the DNA, there are still going to be people out there who swallow this hook, line, sinker, pole and angler.

More Scenes from the Writing Life

The bizarre dilemmas that come up when writing from the viewpoints of characters from other planets:

1. When you're looking for a synonym for "dark brown," you discover that all of them are utterly useless, as an alien likely won't be thinking in terms of chocolate, coffee, liver, or any other familiar foodstuff. Not unless they've been hanging round Earth far too long.

2. Dodge trying to find a non-exhausted metaphor for "ink blot" by spending ten minutes hunting down Moby's song "Very" online. (Project Playlist doesn't have it anymore, the buggers. How dare they do this to me?!.) Then return to wondering if your aliens would think in terms of ink blots, seeing as how they do in fact have ink...

3. But not sandwiches. A sandwich is a foodstuff most useful to beings with hands and opposable thumbs. Equines, not so much. And "sandwiched between" is an even more exhausted metaphor than "ink blot" anyway.

4. Just when I think I'm going to have to resort to "[that one dude], [dude 2], and [dude 3]," the final three characters, who have been eluding me for over ten fucking years, show up and fit themselves into place like straggling choir members arriving two seconds before the performance begins. The audience will likely think they were there the entire damned time.

5. Spend several moments sounding out the new names and trying to figure out how to spell them so that they a) don't look dorky and b) the reader can hopefully pronounce them. Sigh. Hope for the best and expect the worst: after all, people still can't pronounce Aes Sedai, even though Robert Jordan has the phonetic spellings in the back of every damned book. "A's Seddy" indeed. (It's eyes suh-die, people, come the fuck on.)

I haven't even gone into the minor catastrophe looming when I realized I'd fucked up everybody's position in the line at the beginning of the story, or the difficulty of writing dialogue without using contractions (try making it sound natural, I double-dog dare you), or trying to think like a smartass sentient equine, but you get the picture.

The point is to make the final product look absolutely effortless. That's the beginning and end of writing. Think of it this way: the first draft is an abattoir of a crime scene. The final draft should take a forensic technician with a tank of Luminol to find the blood spatter, and even then, they'd better have to rip up the floorboards to get to it.

I'm going to need a bigger bucket of bleach and a truckload of sponges, but we'll get there. I'll have those fuckers using microscopes.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Ethics for thee, but not for me (h/t Carpetbagger):

Anchorage, Alaska – Last week, lawyers for Senator Ted Stevens filed several motions asserting that Senators are above the law and
deserve special treatment. Specifically, the defense explained that since the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, they cannot investigate Stevens or interview his staff since they are part of the legislative branch. Stevens’ attorneys went as far to say that only Congress can discipline a Senator who violates the law by lying on the financial disclosure forms. However, Stevens voted for the legislation which established the financial disclosure forms. In essence, Stevens’ defense is that legislation he supported is now unconstitutional, and therefore the case should be dismissed.

Funny how things you voted for become conveniently "unconstitutional" when they turn around and bite you on the ass, innit? Seems this has been a rather common refrain in Republicon circles. Bush regularly ignores laws he doesn't like. John McCain is all for campaign finance reform until his campain finds such reforms get in the way of his fundraising. And on and on it goes. I think it's time the bastards in Washington realized that if you make the laws, you get to follow them yourself. No fucking exceptions, comprende?

What else can we expect from people who have no conception of reality? For a shining example of just how insane the right wing's become, we need look no further than our old buddy Newt:

Last night on Fox News, host Sean Hannity and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) returned (as they often do) to Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) recent suggestion that Americans inflate their tires properly in order to save energy costs.

Seeming to outdo his previous false attacks on this issue, Gingrich claimed that Obama’s idea is actually encouraging Americans to “enrich Big Oil” because selling air has “a higher profit margin than selling gasoline”:

GINGRICH: Well, I got a very funny e-mail from a retired military officer in Tampa who pointed out that most tire inflation is done at service stations and you pay for it. And it’s actually a higher profit margin than selling gasoline. So Sen. Obama was urging you to go out and enrich Big Oil by inflating your tires instead of buying gas.

Um. Newt. Big Oil sells oil, not air. Service stations sell air. I know reality's an insurmountable challenge, and you all love to believe every stupid claim you get in your email inbox, but do try to keep up, there's a good little fuckwit.

Then again, maybe not. When Republicons try to employ logic, the results are - well, cringe-inducing:

During a House GOP press conference today, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) used the power of logic to push for increased coal mining as well as increased oil drilling. To help make his case, Shimkus held up a lump of Illinois coal and even displayed the jersey of the Southern Illinois Miners:

You know, if drilling is good, drilling and mining is better. … It’s drilling and mining and using great resources like Illinois coal. You all follow the congressional baseball game. I wore this uniform proudly. It says, ‘The Miners.’ The mining industry and coal is part of the solution.

Indeed they are - if you're defining the problem as far too much clean air and a distinct lack of unsightly strip mines.

Isn't it cute how he's had a flash of inspiration by looking at a baseball jersey? "Hey... this says The Miners. The answer's been right in front of me all along!" Look, I know sports can inspire people, but this is just fucking ridiculous.

And what day would be complete without another McCain lie?

In December, when most of the leading presidential candidates were releasing holiday-themed ads, John McCain — who’s “reluctant” to talk about his service during Vietnam — was able to combine two messages in a single campaign commercial: “One night, after being mistreated as a POW, a guard loosened the ropes binding me, easing my pain. On Christmas, that same guard approached me, and without saying a word, he drew a cross in the sand. We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas.”

It’s a story McCain has not only put in his ads, but has also repeated for several years, including over the weekend, at the forum at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.

Yesterday, however, questions arose about its veracity.

According to a very persuasive Daily Kos diary, the anecdote McCain told about a North Vietnamese prison guard making a cross in the dirt as a sign of solidarity — or as he said, “just two Christians worshiping together” — is very similar to a story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his times in the Soviet Gulags.

“As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.”

Steven Waldman notes that McCain’s recounting of this story has changed over the years and “has gradually morphed
from being about the humanity of the guard to being about the Christian faith of the guard and John McCain.”

Is it possible that Solzhenitsyn and McCain had extremely similar experiences? Of course it is. Coincidences happen.

But there’s reason to be suspicious about whether McCain’s powerful anecdote is apocryphal.

Yes, like the fact McCain didn't even bring it up until 1999, after Solzhenitsyn's story came out. Carpetbagger et al recommend caution in questioning this, but for fuck's sake. I'm a writer. I can spot a bit o' plagarism when I sees it. McCain has a pattern of lying and claiming credit for things he didn't do. The stories are remarkably similar. McCain's story came out after Solzhenitsyn's. Let's just put it this way: if it's proved McCain lifted this from Solzhenitsyn, I won't have a heart attack.

Just please tell me these lying, stupid motherfuckers are going to get their asses handed to them this November.

Wow. Just.... Wow.

Sitemeter led me to a new delight tonight: PTET.

Leads DaveScot around by the nose.

Unleashes the Smack-o-Matic until Denyse O'Leary blubbers.

Has the same soft spot for Buddhism I do (once the religious crap's stripped away and the philosophy's left to shine).

I likes this blog!

Oh, and, you know, there was that really nice compliment that melted me into a soppy little puddle:

While I'm in a blog-rolling mood, props to En Tequila Es Verdad for being without question the best blog in the world today...

Wow. I mean... really... wow. That's overwhelming, is what that is. Gracias.

But you know what? This blog wouldn't be anything without my readers. I scribble it, but you, my darlings, are the ones who inspire it. So that compliment, there: that belongs to you.

Salud, mi amigos.

Note to McCain Lackeys: You Might Want to Have a Talk with John

Carpetbagger has some good advice for supporters of John McLame they'd do well to heed:

If Republican hacks are going to go on national television to attack Barack Obama for supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution on Russia’s aggression towards Georgia, they probably ought to know that John McCain supports the same U.N. Security Council resolution on Russia’s aggression towards Georgia.

Now, if we had a healthy political press, this would have made for some highly entertaining television. However, we have a screaming bunch of assmonkeys who don't have the first fucking clue as to how to perform little journalistic functions like fact checking. If it's not in their teleprompter, they have no idea it exists. So we get pieces like this, wherein a McCain apologist attacks Barack Obama for a position McCain also holds, and it takes the fucking bloggers to point this out.

You know. The same bloggers who are derided as Cheeto-scarfing, Mom's-basement-dwelling amateurs by our "professional" news media.

I weep for my country.

Fighting Fair

I don't hang about Conservapedia much, or I wouldn't have missed this delightful exchange. Y'see, Andy Schlafly, assclown extraordinaire, would lurrrv to debate a stinking librul - except for the fact he can't. He ran away from Ames like a kicked cur.

(Note to Andy: here's how challenges work. If you make 'em, you pay for 'em, and you stick by the original terms of your fucking challenge. Unless, of course, you're so shit-scared of being publicly clobbered by a flaming liberal that you have to find a way to weasel out when one of the buggers misunderstands your grandstanding, chest-thumping, self-congratulatory bullshit and actually takes you seriously.)

The problem is this: Ames and people like him not only fight fair, they fight nice. They're good, kind, decent people who try not to sink to the stinking pits of depravity their neocon opponents inhabit. And this is why liberals lose even when they win.

Ames won this round. Andy will claim the victory because he's a lying sack of choleric monkey shit. It's how the game is played, and the fake celebrations confuse people into believing something's there to be celebrated. Since a liberal wouldn't think of celebrating such a hollow victory, well, it's the neocons who look like they've won.

I think there's a lesson in here.

Yes, we have values, and we shouldn't engage in tactics we despise to win.

But we need to be better bastards.

When slime like Andy tries to kick liberals in the teeth, don't turn the other cheek. Let him break his foot hitting the hard stuff.

When bottom feeders like Andy try to move the goalposts, give their hands a good, sharp smack and announce, "The goalposts stay where they are, you son of a bitch. What, you have to cheat to win now?"

We don't have to be nasty, necessarily. But liberals have a tendency to be conciliatory and offer compromises and try to accommodate, and people like Andy see that as weakness. They use others' good will to fuck them over, because they know they can get away with it. They don't understand diplomacy. They do, however, understand the use of force.

So we should get forceful. When we've tried a compromise and found the only thing our opponent's willing to compromise is his integrity, compromise stops, and the smackdown begins. Call them out. Call them six kinds of coward, explain to the universe at large just what a stupid fucking loser your opponents have to be to pull that shit, expose the dishonesty and don't fucking back down. Bludgeon them with the truth. Ream them with the facts. Don't get nice again until they've shown you their belly. Because if you offer your hand the instant they stop growling but before they've shown submission, you're gonna lose a finger.

And no, that's not going to keep these pathetic little liars from slithering their way out of a tight corner and trying to play the victor. They won't fight you honestly because they know they're gonna lose. That's why you celebrate calling them out on their lies. Throw the loudest, longest victory party evah whenever some neocon weasel-fucker has just ducked, weaved, and goal-post shifted himself away from certain disaster.

Stuff your liberal guilt into a sack and drown it. What do you have to feel guilty about when you're fighting fair? You're being assertive, not aggressive. You don't lie, you don't cheat, you don't make impossible demands, so there's nothing in the world to be ashamed of. And if you called your opponent a two-faced goat-fucker during a heated exchange, well, sometimes, truth hurts, but it's important to tell the truth even so.

We don't have to fight dirty. But fighting fair doesn't mean having to fight nice.

I Wonder if PZ Will Let Me Steal His Guest Bloggers

PZ's been off playing in the Galapagos Islands, leaving Pharyngula in the capable hands of a bevvy of guest bloggers. He's just announced his imminent return, and I'm happy, but...

I was really starting to enjoy the variety of viewpoints.

And the long posts on various aspects of biology.

I'd grown rather fond of them, in fact. And I don't know if they have blogs of their own. The pain of separation looms.

Unless....

I can lure them over here.

Lessee. What inducements can I offer?

• A forum in which anything and everything can be discussed.
• Some of the most amazing commenters in the blogosphere.
• Post at your own convenience: daily, weekly, monthly, whatev.
• Your very own sign-in, not this mere minion stuff.
  
• Unlimited free (virtual) drinks.
• And have I mentioned the quality of my commenters?

Is it enough? Only time will tell.

LisaJ, MAJeff, Danio, Sastra: I hereby invite you to En Tequila Es Verdad. Mi casa es su casa. Email me at dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com if you'd like a room over the cantina.

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Could it be justice at last(h/t Think Progress)?

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department
will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas.

It would be fantastic to see prosecutions of these mercenary bastards. Too many private firms seem trigger-happy, lawless, and completely out of control. Time to make them aware that there is such a thing as the law, and that you can't murder indiscriminately. "War zone" does not equal "open season."

This would also be a nice message to the Iraqis that, you know, we give two tugs on a dead dog's dick for their welfare.

In other news of potential justice, the former Justice Department assclowns who used political litmus tests in hiring and firing attorneys may be in for a much-needed arse kicking:

Six attorneys rejected from civil service positions at the Justice Department filed a lawsuit today against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other top officials for allegedly violating their rights by taking politics into consideration in the hiring process.

The suit is an attempt to hold top officials accountable for the hiring scandal that ultimately led to Gonzales' resignation last year, said Daniel Metcalfe, the attorney for the plaintiffs who is also executive director of its Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University's Washington College of Law.

"My clients wish that they hadn't had to bring this lawsuit -- they would have greatly preferred to be working inside the Justice Department, where by all rights they deserved to be, defending the government in court rather than standing as victimized examples of government wrongdoing," said Metcalfe, a former longtime Justice Department official.

Welcome to the Bush regime, where being on the receiving end of a government ass-raping is the order of the day if you're not an ultraconservative, loyal Bushie. I'm glad these six are fighting back. I hope the fuckwits who rejected them on ideological grounds get their teeth handed to them in a hat by the courts.

Another day, another Republicon at a loss for words:

This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory asserted that the Republican Party “used to be the party of big ideas.” Gregory then asked his guest Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), “What’s the big idea Senator McCain is campaigning on?” Jindal responded, “I think there’s several,” but couldn’t provide an answer. Gregory asked again, “Where are the new big ideas of the Republican Party that John McCain is, is championing?” And again Jindal couldn’t provide an answer.

I love it when they get all tongue-tied. That seems to be happening a lot lately. I think that might be because the Republicon party is out of ideas, has no accomplishments to speak of other than completely fucking the country, and are hated by all but the most deluded of the neo-theo-cons.

Since that's the case, you may be wondering just why McCain's polling so close to Obama. Turns out there's a simple answer: Americans are fucking clueless:

The handwringing over Barack Obama’s modest lead in the polls is already rather tiresome — “Why isn’t Obama up by double digits?” the political world demands to know — and there’s no shortage of competing rationales to explain it. But the NYT’s Frank Rich offers one of the more compelling explanations I’ve seen: “[T]he public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.”

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image…. With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

What follows is one of the most succinct takedowns of the McCain myth I have ever seen. And in a national newspaper, no less. Phenominal. I hope a few people spilled their Wheaties reading that one this morning.

This would come on top of the bad moment they had last night, wherein they learned their hero has some funny ideas about who's rich:

Last night, during his Saddleback Church presidential forum, Pastor Rick Warren asked both Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to “define rich.” With regard to tax brackets, “where do you move from middle class to rich?” Warren asked. Obama said, “if you are making $150,000 a year or less, as a family, then you’re middle class.”

McCain, however, dismissed Warren’s question, asking in jest, “How about $5 million?”

WARREN: Everybody talks about, you know, taxing the rich, but not the poor, the middle class. At what point, give me a number, give me a specific number. Where do you move from middle class to rich? […]

MCCAIN: How about $5 million?

Go read his remarks in full context on Carpetbagger. They get worse. The man is living in some kind of alternate universe.

Aren't they all?

Sunday Sensational Science

Don't laugh. I'm about to admit that the movie The Saint captured my imagination. Look, I know it was total cheese, and I know that cold fusion is controversial and quite possibly bunkum, but that line of Elisabeth Shue's has haunted me for years: her scientist character asks us to imagine driving our cars a million miles on a gallon of seawater. I've imagined it ever since.

Well, we're one step closer to that day. But it won't be cold fusion that gets us there. It's cobalt, fuel cells, and some very determined scientists at MIT.

We've been able to split water into its component hydrogen and oxygen molecules for centuries, but as far as an energy source, it's been virtually useless. It takes energy to break things up. Clean, cheap fuel isn't going to happen when you have to use hydrocarbons to create hydrogen fuel, or when the materials that help the process along cost thousands of dollars per ounce.


So Daniel Nocera, head of MIT's Solar Revolution Project, decided to take a cue from nature. Plants manage to split water into hydrogen and oxygen quite efficiently, using just the power of the sun. What if we could find man-made materials that could do the same thing? Nocera and his team asked.

We could end up holding the key to clean energy in our hands.

They started playing with the periodic chart. They started mixing chemicals. And then:

"We [have] figured out a way just using a glass of water at room temperature, under atmospheric pressure," Nocera says. "This thing [a thin film of cobalt and phosphate on an electrode] just churns away making [oxygen] from water."

Think about this for a moment. No exotic metals as catalysts. No special temperatures or pressures necessary. Just a simple little setup that could run on a beam of sunlight, giving us a fuel that could power our planet cleanly.

The possibilities are intriguing.
.
Since it is quite explosive, carrying huge tanks of hydrogen in your car would be dangerous. In theory, it would be possible to bring a jug of water instead and produce little bits of the gas on demand.

But let's not get hung up on cars. It's not just cars, but houses: should this become an economically viable technology, it would solve the problem of powering your home on a cloudy day. You'll have plenty of hydrogen stored up, to use as needed.

And what about consumer electronics? Did you ever expect your cell phone and computer could run on water? There's a good chance they someday will:

The days of fast-fading cellular phone batteries may soon be over. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently developed a working prototype for a portable fuel cell energy source that could power a cellular phone 300 percent longer than existing rechargeable batteries do. Indeed, the new technology would be less expensive, smaller and more powerful than any battery currently in use, according to Jeff Morse of LLNL's Center for Microtechnology Engineering. He predicts that it could replace standard lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries in a number of consumer electronics products, such as laptops and handheld computers.

The new power source, which runs on liquid fuels, has at its core a thin layer of electrolyte materials sandwiched between electrode materials. As control elements distribute the fuel over one electrode surface, the other receives air. Heating of the electrolyte-electrode layers stimulates the flow of protons from the fuel, sending them across the electrolyte layer to the air-breathing electrode. The protons then react with oxygen to generate electrical current. Conveniently, recharging the power source requires only a simple switch of fuel cartridges.

And where would this liquid fuel come from? You guessed it: your little electrolyzer gizmo made cheap and simple by Daniel Nocera et al.

We're closer to a future where energy is cheap, abundant, and non-polluting. The science of energy will get us there, one inspiration at a time.





Tip o' the shot glass to the Wired Science blog, which provided the inspiration for this Sunday's science. As always, click on the photos for their sources and fun, (usually) relevant additional material.

Scenes From the Fiction Writing Life

People get really interested in the process of storytelling. Where do ideas come from, how did you create characters, etc.

It's not all that fascinating, I'm afraid. Most of it's a seemingly endless stream of frustration, blocks, false starts, recalcitrant words, and sudden revelations of your own appalling ignorance. A writer at work looks like the sort of people stuck glaring at a computer loaded with a Windows operating system that's just decided to take the evening off.

Then things start to frantically fall into place, and the writer feels like a cat caught in a riptide, thrashing at the water with all four limbs, trying valiantly not to drown.

So here's where I'm at with this story: last night, I got clobbered with a profound ethical dilemma that never occurred to me before. If you'd been there to witness, the scene would have looked like this: writer stands on porch in cool night breeze, smiling happily at the stars whilst smoking a cigarette. Writer's entire body suddenly jerks, cigarette nearly flies over the balcony rail, smile absconds, and a stream of obscenities flows. Writer starts to walk into the house with lit cigarette, stops just in time, smokes as fast as possible while leaning down to deposit cigarette in ashtray, and then dives into the house to pound a frantic note on the computer, still cursing, eyes roughly the size of Frisbees. Two hours of profuse typing follow.

Tonight, the inspiration refused to flow. You would have seen the writer eyeballing the night's previous work with the same expression mother-in-laws have when they come for unexpected visits and find the house in slight disarray. Then there's the digging through previous notes, the rising despair, the procrastination as writer pulls up Solitaire and fiddles with just the right music to persuade the Muse to pony up. Slowly, the tension fades as the next scene reluctantly presents itself. Gaiety ensues. The writer goes out for a celebratory smoke, comes back in to write, and then spends a solid hour researching horse colors online because she doesn't have the slightest fucking clue what color the next character is.

Yes, you can be stopped in your tracks in the middle of a story over ridiculous details.

I'm still not sure what color Aisonah is. And it's driving me utterly crazy, because when I write, I need to see. I can't get into the story and write down what's happening if I can't see the details.

There she goes. A flash of rose, a hint of pale blue, dusted over cream. Now I can begin to see her.

Now I have to go write her.

It's Official: Obama's Not the Antichrist

I can't believe we're even having this dialogue in this country.

Last night CNN aired a segment wondering aloud whether or not Obama is the Antichrist. It's just the latest step in making what ought to be an outrageous and nonsensical bit of religious nuttery into an actual campaign issue. Raw Story has the details:

CNN notes that regardless of its intent, though, the [McCain campaign] ad seems to have spurred increased interest in the baseless speculation. At least one entire blog is devoted to the question and a Google search for "Obama Antichrist" returns nearly 1 million returns.

And regardless of CNN's intent, it too managed to handle the story in such a "fair and balanced" fashion that the interest of which it speaks will, in turn, ratchet up yet another notch.

But the Supreme High Authorities on All Things Antichrist have spoken, and the verdict is: not so much.

First up from the God machine this week is good news from some popular end-times authors — they don’t like Barack Obama, but they’re pretty sure he’s not literally the antichrist. (via Ron Chusid)

John McCain’s campaign ad “The One” has generated a lot of buzz regarding the “Left Behind Series.” Political commentators are comparing McCain’s portrayal of competitor Barack Obama with the blockbuster apocalyptic series’ depiction of the antichrist. But even the series authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins don’t think Obama is the antichrist. What may have been created as a farce has generated a firestorm of controversy on the internet.

LaHaye and Jenkins take a literal interpretation of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation. They believe the antichrist will surface on the world stage at some point, but neither see Obama in that role. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist,” says novelist Jenkins. “I tell everyone that I don’t think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics.”

“I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist,” adds LaHaye, “but from my reading of scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American.”

First, I guess this is good news. A lot of strange folks really do consider LaHaye and Jenkins “authorities” on Biblical end-times prophecies, so if they announce Obama’s in the clear, those who take this seriously may very well believe them.

Okay? Can we stop being so outrageously fucking ridiculous as to actually debate on fucking CNN whether or not a presidential candidate in America is really truly the fucking Antichrist?

People sometimes wonder why I can't stand religion. Seeing the kind of bullshit that arises, the breathtaking insanity, the never-ending fuckery, I wonder how in the fuck they can possibly ask that question.

Ye Haven't Got Long, Ye Elitist Bastards!

Captain Blake Stacey be expectin' ye - and ye don't want to disappoint Captain Stacey.

Nay, indeed! The only thing bigger than himself is his brain, and he be looking for Elitist Bastard submissions to feed that monstrous intellect o' his.

He'll be taking the HMS Elitist Bastard to sea on August 30th. You'd best be on deck and reporting for duty by August 29th, then, me brilliant bastards. Send those submissions, or ye'll be wishing ye did!

Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

My outrage factor is down, but my amusement factor is through the roof today. I've got images of bumbling clowns spilling from tiny cars and falling all over each other, and I likes it.

If presidential campaigns are numbers games, McCain might as well just fucking fold:

The McCain campaign scored some favorable headlines yesterday when it announced that it had raised $27 million in July. How’d the Obama campaign do over the same time period? Obama’s team sent out this press release this afternoon:

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced today that more than 65,000 new donors contributed to the Obama campaign during the month of July, bringing the total raised for the month to over $51 million. More than 2 million people have now contributed to the campaign.

“The 65,000 new donors to the Obama campaign demonstrate just how strongly the American people are looking to fundamentally change business as usual in Washington. We are proud of the millions of volunteers and more than two million donors to the Obama campaign who will provide the backbone of our campaign to put America back on track and reject the old politics and failed Bush policies, which is all John McCain is offering,” said David Plouffe, campaign manager of Obama for America.

McCain’s $27 million was the best month for his campaign to date, but it was nevertheless about half of Obama’s total. What’s more, given that Obama spent a week in July overseas, when he held no fundraisers, his total is all the more impressive.

I think Obama could spend a month in a cave, and still beat McCain's fundraising totals. McCain, in fact, would be desperately screwed if it wasn't for his good buddies Big Bidness:

The Hill reports that the CEOs of the 100 biggest Fortune 500 corporations have given approximately 10 times as much to John McCain as they have to Barack Obama. McCain has received $208,200 from these chief executive officers; meanwhile, Obama has taken in $20,400 from the same group of people...

Something to do with the billions and billions in tax breaks for the richest companies and people, I think. Kinda sad that all those rich buggers still can't beat Obama's fundraising totals, innit?

Where else are McCain's numbers suffering? Well, this should give you some indication of the humiliation to come:

This is old news, but it's utterly hilarious:

Ron Paul is moving his so-called Rally for the Republic from the University of Minnesota's Williams Arena to the Target Center in Minneapolis.

In an e-mail to supporters, Paul said he made the move after measuring the excitement and enthusiasm of his supporters. That means the campaign expects 15,000 people to fill the arena, 4,000 more than could have attended at the university.

"We would not have put all of our cards on the table if we weren't very very confident that we would fill the Target Center," said Jesse Benton -- the spokesman for Paul's Campaign for Liberty group.

Why is this hilarious? Because the 15,000 figure given in the MPR piece is almost certainly an underestimate. In reality, the Target Center can hold more people than the Xcel Center, which is the venue where the Republican National Convention will be held at the same time as the Paul rally.

Yup. A strange little Libertarian can outdraw McCain. That's just pathetic.

The hilarity continues on the energy front. Republicons have gone completely round the bend, up the river, and are now trying to paddle up bullshit creek with their bare hands:

The conservative periodical American Spectator has published a piece by Andrew Cline, editorial page editor of the Manchester Union Leader, which argues that lifting the offshore drilling moratorium would “lower oil company profits“:

But Republicans have a golden opportunity here to turn the tables back on the Democrats. All they have to do is give a basic economics lesson every chance they get. The American people aren’t stupid; they will get it. The lesson is this:

If the Democrats really wanted to cut the profits of Big Oil, they would vote to…increase the supply of oil! Oil company profits are so high because the price of oil is so high. The price is so high because demand is so much higher than supply. Allowing oil companies to drill for more oil will increase supply, which will lower prices, which will lower oil company profits!

I wonder what it feels like to be so utterly fucking stupid. I mean, we're talking serious, IQ-in-the-low-60s stupid here. Think Progress debunks this little nugget nicely, and the only sad thing is that some Americans are so stupid that they'll need it spelled out for them in nice clear block capitals. Allow me to indulge: INCREASING THE SUPPLY OF OIL WILL NOT LOWER OIL COMPANY PROFITS. THEY WILL JUST SELL MORE, WHICH WILL MAKE THEM LOTS OF MONEY. ASK WAL-MART HOW THAT WORKS.

But the more money they make, the more the Big Oil companies suffer. Just ask Bob:

And speaking of Colorado, the campaign of Democratic Senate nominee Mark Udall is sending around this tracker audio of Republican nominee Bob Schaffer complaining that the federal government is taking too much money from the oil companies. "But because prices are soaring, the reality is the federal government is raking in a bunch of cash right now on the backs of energy producers," Schaffer says -- perhaps not the most popular message this year...

Not so much, no. Seems to me oil companies should be paying an assload of taxes on their spectacular profits. After all, they get us into wars, muck up the environment, and fight renewable energy tooth-and-nail. If cigarettes can be taxed for being murderous blots on the human condition, Big Oil can pony up a little cash, too.

Anyway, speaking of Colorado and unpopular messages, you remember that slight lead McCain managed over Obama in Colorado? Pucker up - it's going bye-bye:

If they repolled today, chances are very good that slim gain would be gone. Because there's one thing you do not mess with in Colorado, and that's water.

In an interview yesterday with the Pueble Chieftan, McCain committed what could amount political suicide in the state by saying that the 1922 water compact negotiated between seven western states should be renegotiated to give Arizona, Nevada, and California (the Lower Basin states) more water. That's unlikely to make Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico (the Upper Basin states) any happier than it's made Colorado.

There's nothing more controversial in the West than water, and the single water issue that is most pressing is what happens as the Colorado drainage continues to experience drought and demand continues to grow....

What does Bob have to say about that cunning plan of McCain's?

"Over my cold, dead, political carcass," Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer said.

Well, then. And what he said was actually rather mild compared to what the Denver Post says:

Memo to: John McCain.

From: Five million thirst-crazed Coloradans.

Subject: Forget about winning our nine electoral votes next November. We don't vote for water rustlers in this state; we tar and feather them! ...

Something tells me McCain's popularity just took a stunning nosedive. I have no idea where I got that impression. Must be that feminine intooisshin o' mine.

I'm actually starting to feel a slight hint of optimism about November. Don't burst my bubble - I know the fuckers will probably find a way to steal the election, but for now, I just want to bask in the sensation of believing they're going to be just that little bit too stupid to manage it.

What the Fuck Can I Possibly Say?

I work with a wonderful young woman from Serbia. She's one of the most competent people I've ever met: practical, insightful, and wise. She frequently leaves me tongue-tied, but never more than when we were on a break the other day, when she asked me, "What do you think should be done about what's happening in Georgia?"

How the fuck can I answer that? I'm standing with a woman who went through war. She keeps her important documents packed in easily portable containers because she knows safety can crumble in an instant. Americans talk about natural disasters tearing their homes down around them: she watched homes get bombed into oblivion. And she's been on the receiving end of large countries playing deadly political games with small ones.

I got the sense she expects America to do the right thing. How? I told her what I honestly believe to be true: the European Union is going to have to step up and take the lead on this one, because our credibility is shattered. How can America condemn Russia for expansionist, regime-changing belligerence when we've engaged in the same bad behavior? We have no diplomatic capital left. We've spent our moral authority. And our military readiness is a fucking joke. We can't afford to kick Iran around, much less start a brawl with fucking Russia. And the Russians know it. We can't bluff 'em: the bluff's already been called.

I wish we could stop this. We can't - not alone.

And I don't know enough about the history and politics of the region to answer the whys. I don't know exactly why Russia's flexing its muscles, or why it chose Georgia to kick around. I don't know what the people over there want. I don't know what the separatists want from Russia, Georgia, or America. I don't know what they expect us to do. I don't know how they can expect us to do anything. I got the sense that some people are still looking to America to lead the way into peace and democracy. They don't understand that our current regime has no comprehension of either.

"I just want leaders to stop invading countries and killing people," I finally said. To which she laughed, and agreed: this is exactly what we all want, an end to the politics of the big guns and the military jack boot. We just want leaders who are willing to settle things with diplomacy and civility rather than reaching for bombs, without a single fucking care in the world as to the ordinary people who will die for their ambitions.

I wish America could lead on that front. I wish America had the diplomatic and moral might to say, with authority, without hypocrisy, that the killing needs to stop. We'll help you stop it, and we'll help you find solutions that work.

It's sad how Pollyanna that sounds. Working together to negotiate the best possible outcome for all is the tough, strong way to handle international relations. It's just the warmongers who have made "negotiation" a synonym for "weakness." It's the warmongers who have so squandered our political capital that we don't have a penny to spare.

Bet You Never Thought of Mathematics as Emotional Before

Efrique, whose couch I may someday temporarily have to beg as it's located far away from McCain, has a glorious post up exploring the emotions elicited by mathematics.

Before I got older and wiser, I used to see mathematicians as cold, passionless logic machines. I couldn't conceive of an emotional connection to all of those rigid numbers. It took a lot of reading in science before I realized that math can do exactly what Efrique describes:

A really clever manipul