Did you hear about the question rigging business with the Democratic Debate last week? Seems there was a college student from UNLV who wanted to ask Hillary a question about the Rocky Flats Nuclear Storage Facility and it was already pre-approved for the debate. CNN made her dump that in favor of a question about whether Hillary preferred diamonds or pearls. How sexist and demeaning can you get?- both to the Senator, and to the college student. Un-f*%king-believable. And I would have liked to have heard her response, because that is just the kind of meaty issue Hillary has been getting kind of dodgy on lately. Here's the link [link] But the sheer gall of it just infuriates me. Would they have made a male participant ask Barack Obama if he prefers boxers or briefs instead of a question on his stance on drivers licenses for illegal aliens? Somehow I doubt it.

On another subject, my dear friend Pan-Zareta noted in a comment on my journal entry from Saturday that " a refrigerated truck which held decomposing Iraqi bodies for two weeks was given a lick and a promise and then loaded with food and ice which was intended for the consumption of our troops. The man who blew the whistle was fired for 'not being a team player.' " I

I am dumbfounded. I can only think that the sheer horror of what is going on over there, of being caught in the middle of this violent deep-seated ages-old fight that is not theirs, combined with the fact that they are commanded at the top by immoral officers and being kept there for far too long away from their families, with inadequate equipment and supplies, has driven our soldiers do to things they would not otherwise do. They are being dehumanized by being in an unacceptable intolerable situation - the same thing happened in VietNam. It doesn't necessarily mean the boys that did it are bad kids, it means it's an immoral war and we need to get our ass out of it and bring them home, NOW.

Having been heavily involved with Powwows and the Native American world for about fourteen years now, I tend to take it a little personally when people start taking potshots at Indian people and culture. Recently a young Alaskan Native girl, about age 18, gave an intelligent testimony before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. She spoke about the effects that Global Warming has had on the environment in her area, and how those environmental changes have impacted her tribe and her life. She was understandably moved during her testimony, as were many who listened to her.

Rush Limbaugh, Head PooBah of the first wave of the NeoCons, took it upon himself to play the audiotape of this sweet young Indian girl's testimony on his radio show (thank heaven at least he isn't on tv anymore.) He interspersed his sarcastic and highly inaccurate and inappropriate remarks with her speech, and encouraged some idiot caller to harass and ridicule her right along with him. Rather than go into an extensive rant about it myself, I instead offer some websites with the actual evidence and allow you to check it out. See for yourself from the first link just how bad it was, and then go on to check out from other sites and my quote some other interesting tidbits on what venom this man and one of his cohorts are spewing out into the airwaves.

Here is the link to the article about Limbaugh's shenanigans with the poor young girl - it includes a transcript of the fiasco, and a link to the audiotape if you are feeling really masochistic

[link]

This is a fun one that documents some of his racial slurs and his ideas about Indian stereotypes and team mascots. You'll love this.

[link]

And last but not least: (this is a great site, by the way) The first part, towards the top, is largely recap of the recent incident with the Native Alaskan girl and his assholery in relation to her, and their advocacy of a boycott. (Somehow I SERIOUSLY doubt if every single Indian in the US that currently listens to Limbaugh now started boycotting him, that there would be much of a dip in his listenership. )

But read a little further and you will be treated to a description of a earlier incident where Limbaugh's hijinks were even more ... distasteful is not a strong enough word. You just have to read it.

[link]


Pretty disgusting stuff. In the process of looking into this I encountered a rant from Paul Harvey (I thought he was long dead - apparently his brain already is) that was so fascist and disgusting in its nature I was truly appalled, as were a number of other Native American and Black organizations. Here is my favorite quote:

"But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans.

Yes, that was biological warfare!

And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous.

And, yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most nation states...."

Fun stuff, huh? This guy is still listened to and considered gospel by over 22 million Americans a day in over 1500 radio stations, and he goes out all over the world. And on the ABC radio network, folks - American Broadcasting Corporation, who should truly be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to be carried on their airwaves. At least Limbaugh has to find stations willing to carry him now - he instigated his own network trying to compensate for all the ones that dropped him with his drug problems and all the lawsuits that have been filed against him. And he is STILL said by Wikipedia to have an average of 13.5 million viewers weekly, which I find truly frightening. I was also quite disappointed to see Barnes and Noble as a sponsor of his website.

As always, a laurel wreath goes to MSNBC's Keith Olberman - he is the only mainstream media person who calls these two out on the carpet regularly for their ridiculous brand of narrow-minded arrogance and sheer stupidity - usually in his "Worst Person of the World Segment." I just feel sorry for the person on his staff designated to listen to these morons every single damn day so they can report their latest idiocies to Keith. What a job.

I guess the answer really is that there is there are no easy answers. Boycotting is a tool of limited use with radio zealots like these. But the one thing I DO know is that we can't be asleep at the wheel. We have to continue to vigilantly pay attention, and let them know we are watching and listening to everything they say, and we neither like nor tolerate their brand of bigotry and intolerance.

Ok I got sucked into another one... maybe it was because of my broody mood...

[link]

This one claimed to be the "World's Shortest Personality Test," which intrigued me. This was my result:

"You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant.
Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle.
You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs.

For you, comfort and calm are very important.
You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection.
You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong."

I think the jury is still out on the "brilliant" part, and anyone who has ever seen me first thing in the morning might debate the "elegant," but the rest of it is pretty on the nose.

It also sounds exactly like I would describe my father, which is kind of heartbreaking today, because I just got official confirmation that he- who truly was a brilliant, elegant man, has Alzheimers Disease. Now we have a name for the thief that has been stealing his short-term memory for the past several months. My father, for all our differences over the years (his politics are somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun) has always been the most intelligent human being I have ever been privileged to know. He may not have been the most involved or caring father in middle-class America, but he was definitely one of the most intellectually challenging. Growing up at his dinner table I learned the value of debate and rhetoric. As a child in that household, while probably too frequently left to my own devices for most people's tastes, I was always surrounded by a variety of interesting books - on all subjects - to lose myself in, and I learned to be independent and self-sufficient early, skills that have aided me well in my not-always-easy adult life.

He started life a dirt-poor South Carolina farmer's kid, was an Army pilot at 19 and a German POW at 20. He was one of the Civilian Directors in charge of Army Research and Development for Helicopter Aviation throughout the Vietnam War period, an important and stressful job to say the least. When he took an early out in 1975 he got his PhD in Education. He got intrigued with the early personal computers in the process of doing his doctoral thesis, and started a computer consulting business and eventually ended up writing reviews of software for some of the bigger computer magazines. I used to tease him that his study looked like the bridge of the starship Enterprise, he had so many computers in it. Now he has one laptop and can barely remember how to check his email. And when he does check it, he has forgotten what was in it before he gets back downstairs to inform my mother.

He hid the early stages of his mental deterioration behind his reclusive lifestyle and a rigid daily routine, but by the beginning of the Spring was quite noticable, and I confronted my mother about the changes I saw in him. Since then it has been relentless in its progress, and he has already become somewhat childlike in his demeanor and abilities. In a very real way the man I knew as my father is already gone. I don't know what the next years of months have in store for him, but this seems to be a particularly cruel and ironic trick that fate has played on him. For this dignified man, for whom the pursuits of the intellect were of supreme value, to be losing both his mental abilities and his dignity leaves me feeling bereft and angry at the fates. It's hard to cling to the belief that "everything happens for a reason" in the face of something like this.

This was Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from
Monday, November 5th, 2007.
I know this is long, but it is worth it, trust me-
this is extremely important.

If it was up to me I would nominate him for a
Nobel Prize in Journalism

"It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists.

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?

Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die & still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of America ... does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one detail you'd forgotten — that there are rules. And even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans and we're better than that.

We're better than you.

And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.

He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.

So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.

And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."

In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.

So, Levin was fired.

Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you would have been screwed.

And screwed you are.

It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general nominee.

Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words … that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.

And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States of America does not torture," and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either way, he needed to do something about it.

Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.

We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.

Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."

Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.

What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.

It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.

And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.

If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president's latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a "yes" or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.

Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will have to suffice.

Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W. Bush.

Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.

It is: Why were they waterboarded?

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people."

© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

Thank You, Keith. The only man in the mainstream media with the courage to say the Emperor has no clothes.

Clusterfuck Nation is the name of a very brilliant blog full of salient, knowledgable, and therefore very scary comments on what is currently going on in the world of politics, business, and the environment. It is written by an extremely intelligent man named Jim Kunstler. This is his most recent entry.

"Assumptions --October 29, 2007

When historians glance back at 2007 through the haze of their coal-fired stoves, they will mark this year as the onset of the Long Emergency – or whatever they choose to call the unraveling of industrial economies and the complex systems that constituted them. And if they retain any sense of humor – which is very likely since, as wise Sam Beckett once averred, nothing is funnier than unhappiness – they will chuckle at the assumptions that drove the doings and mental operations of those in charge back then (i.e. now).
The price of oil is up 53 percent over a year ago, creeping up now toward the mid-$90-range. The news media is still AWOL on the subject. (The New York Times has nothing about it on today’s front page.) The dollar is losing a penny a week against the Euro. In essence, the American standard of living is dropping like a sash weight. So far, a stunned public is stumbling into impoverishment drunk on Britney Spears video clips. If they ever do sober up, and get to a “…hey, wait a minute…” moment when they recognize the gulf between reality and the story told by leaders in government, business, education, and the media, it is liable to be a very ugly moment in US history.
One of the stupidest assumptions made by the educated salient of adults these days is that we are guaranteed a smooth transition between the cancerous hypertrophy of our current economic environment and the harsher conditions that we are barreling toward. The university profs and the tech sector worker bees are still absolutely confident that some hypothetical “they” will “come up with” magical rescue remedies for running the Happy Motoring system without gasoline. My main message to lecture audiences these days is “…quit putting all your mental energy into propping up car dependency and turn your attention to other tasks such as walkable communities and reviving passenger rail….” Inevitably, someone will then get up and propose that the transition to all-electric cars is nearly upon us, and we should stop worrying. As I said, these are the educated denizens of the colleges. Imagine what the nascar morons believe – that the ghost of Davey Crockett will leave a jug of liquefied “dark matter” under everyone’s Christmas tree this year or next, guaranteed to keep the engines ringing until Elvis ushers in the Rapture.
The educated folks – that is, the ones subject to the grandiose story-lines of techno-triumphalism taught in the universities – are sure that we’ll either invent or organize our way out of the current predicament. A society that put men on the moon in 1969, the story goes, will ramp up another “Apollo Project” to keep things going here. One wonders, of course, what they mean by keeping things going. Even if it were hypothetically possible to keep all the cars running forever, would it be good thing to make suburban-sprawl-building the basis of our economy – because that’s the direct consequence of perpetually cheap energy. Has anyone noticed that the housing bubble and subsequent implosion is following the peak oil line exactly?
It’s a bit harder to discern what the assumptions really are among leaders in the finance sector, since so much of their activity the past ten years has veered into sheer fraud. The story line that everyone is putting out – from the Fed chairman Bernanke to the CEOs of the Big Fundz – is that American finance is a python that has swallowed a few too many pigs, but if we jigger around interest rates a little bit more, and allow some more money to be lent out cheaply, the python will eventually digest the pigs and go slithering happily on its way along the jungle trail with a burp and a fart. From this vantage, one sees a rather different story: more like a gang of human grifters sweating through their Prada suits as it becomes increasingly impossible to conceal massive losses incurred through overt reckless misbehavior. My own guess is that a lot of these boyz will be in line for criminal prosecution before too long.
The political assumptions one hears are the most astoundingly naïve and ridiculous, especially the ones that involve other countries and our relations with them. NY Times followers no doubt believe, along with Tom Friedman, that the global economy is now a permanent fixture of the human condition, and that soon it will transform itself into a colossal engine of “green” (i.e. benign) commerce. Friedman and his followers tend to forget the second law of thermodynamics when spinning their fantasies of a world that can harmlessly manufacture and market an endless number of plastic salad shooters from one side of the planet to the other without incurring any losses to the health of said planet.
My own assumptions are somewhat different. I think we’re likely to see a lot of nations scrambling for survival, initially manifesting in a contest for the world’s dwindling supply of oil (and oil-like substances). For instance, when viewing the globe, few people consider that Japan currently imports 95 percent of its fossil fuel. Japan has been a “good boy” among nations since its episode of “acting out” in the mid-20th century and has enjoyed a long industrial prosperity since then. But what happens when there is not enough oil in the world to be allocated rationally by markets among the powerful nations? Will Japan just roll over and die? Will they shutter the Toyota factories and happily turn to placid tea ceremonies. I think Japan will freak out, and it’s hard to predict exactly who will feel its wrath and how.
Similarly, Europe. Americans view Europe as a kind of theme park full of elderly café layabouts swaddled in cashmere as they enjoy demitasse cups in the outdoor cafes of their comfortable art-filled cities (some of them not long ago rebuilt from rubble). Europe has let America do its dirty work for it in the Middle East for the past decade while enjoying tanker-loads of oil coming up through the Suez Canal. Europe has only had to make a few lame gestures in defense of its oil supplies. But the North Sea oil fields, which for twenty years have hedged the leverage of OPEC, are crapping out at a very steep rate. Sooner or later Europe will freak out over oil, and geo-political flat-earthers will be shocked to see that all the nations of café layabouts can mobilize potent military forces. God knows whose side who will be on, exactly, when that happens, and where America will stand – if its own military is not so exhausted that it can even stand up.
Personally, I think the world will be growing a lot larger again, and less flat, and that eventually America will find itself isolated once again between two oceans – though incursions by desperate foreign armies in one way or another, is not out of the question as the great struggle for resource survival gets underway. In time, however, I think the current Great Nations of the world will lose their ability to project power in the ways we’ve been conditioned to think about it.
In the meantime, our own nation has become a society incapable of thinking, and the failure at all levels of rank, education, and privilege is impressive. If you listen to the people running for president – many of them overt clowns – you’d think that that all the comfortable furnishings of everyday life can continue with a few tweaks of the dials. They are cowards and it is possible that they perfectly represent a whole nation of cowards who deserve cowardly leadership. The danger, of course, is that when a non-cowardly leader finally does step forward in a desperate America, he will not shrink from pushing around a feckless people, or doing their thinking for them.

October 29, 2007 in Commentary on Current Events"

For anyone interested in reading more or subscribing to his blog, the web address is [link]