Fat chance. Let's face it, whatever else Obama may or may not accomplish, he will never miss a chance to perform a set piece of bipartisan pageantry, especially one of this magnitude. He's not going to end warrantless wiretapping or bring the prisoners in Guantanamo before real courts. He might let DADT sit around to his next term and then see if he wants to repeal it. He may be able to get healthcare reform through or not. But President Obama is going to prove every goddamn day that he is more bipartisan than anyone this country has ever seen.
A little over 140 years ago the residents of the American south rose up and began brutally slaughtering thousands of their fellow citizens to defend a despicable system of slavery. They chose to kill and destroy instead of recognizing that the tide of history had finally turned against them. Yet the memory of these traitors and murderers is honored, the reasons for their crimes santized. Deserters from the US military - men who took and then broke an oath of service to the Constitution of the United State - are given memorials and characterized as men of honor. No wonder so much of our country has no understanding of right from wrong. No wonder there is so little concern with prosecuting the crimes committed by the Bush Administration - we still can't stomach an honest accounting of the Civil War! We'd rather let millions of Americans believe comforting lies that continue to damage this nation than force them to simply grow up and face facts.
Let's just declare Bush and Cheney's birthdays federal holidays now and be done with it. Maybe we can build a giant statue of one or the other of them and require everyone to bow before it or risk being thrown into a fiery furnace.
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Pollsters may debate whether Cheney has a higher public approval rating than Paris Hilton or not, but in the shriveled and shrunken Republican Party he's still considered a respectable figure. Always looking to promote ratings-friendly food fights, the media has shamelessly propped him up. A few days ago, the beleagured chair of the NRSC, Texas Know Nothing John Cornyn, said he'd be "proud" to appear with the vice president, anywhere, anytime." Not even anywhere in Texas would be a good idea and for many Republican candidates the idea of campaigning with Cheney is anathema. McCain refused to allow him out of his cage bunker during the 2008 campaign and many non-Southern Republicans wish he was still locked away somewhere.
Even a high profile right-wing Mormon, Utah Senator Robert Bennett, facing a serious primary from an even more extreme winger, has indicated that he doesn't want Cheney coming around Utah during campaign season. Utah! (That's almost as lame as Oklahoma.) More: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-cheney-help-bury-republican-party.html
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Yesterday Crooks and Liars talked with singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith, whose new album, The Loving Kind was inspired by an obituary she read last year when Mildred Loving died and talked about her struggle against racism in terms of the LGBT struggle against bigotry. If you haven't heard the title track, give it a listen over there.
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Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the departing Archbishop of Westminster, had a few things to say about sin this week in welcoming his replacement. It turns out that the greatest sin is not clergy child abuse, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or the like. The greatest sin? Atheism.
Not only did the Cardinal identify atheism as the greatest sin but blamed atheism for past wars — ignoring of course that more people have been killed in the name of God than any other cause. The good Cardinal has also said in the past that atheists are "not fully human."
More: http://jonathanturley.org/2009/05/22/cardinal-the-greatest-sin-is/#more-11181
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Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, the leading cleric who was accused of date rape and covering up the abuse of children by other priests, has a new book out in which he insists that he and other priests did not know it was a crime to have sex with children and thought they would not remember or they would "grow out of it."
Story here.
Jesus Facepalm: because even Jesus doesn't know what to say about your stupidity
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A Blight on Humanity
Paul Krugman has a short but withering post about the fraud that was American conservatism. Riffing off a link to Crooked Timber, which has Richard Posner becoming the latest conservative to jump the movement's ship, Krugman writes:
And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.
Why, indeed, would anyone pretend there is any shred of credibility in anyone who found the Gingrich and Bush eras credible? But Krugman gets to the real point in the next paragraph:
And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren't advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.
They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn't have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.
There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won't try, to regain power. But it's time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It's time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn't. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.
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A Serbian Orthodox Christian drug rehab center has some rather unorthodox techniques…like beating the crap out of recidivists. Don't watch the video at that link if violence makes you faint: it shows a thug first smacking a guy hard many times with a shovel, then punching and slapping him until he's reeling and falls to the floor. It's a nice touch when he's bounced off a wall and rattles the Orthodox icons hanging there.
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Orwellian-named "Liberty University," Jerry Falwell's Xian-Jihadist madrassa/diploma mill, has declared it is "unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by Liberty University", and so has just revoked the recognition of college Democrats.
There's a broom-closet, over by where the black maintenance men have their showers that's empty, sometimes. Falwell was quoted elsewhere claiming the "University" was not at all to be accused of quelling freedom of speech or expression. No, no, not at all. Just policing the old orthodoxy. Purity is the by-word here.
The late Jarry Falwell, who founded Liberty University, demonstrating moral principles:
"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers ... AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
"You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" --on the 9/11 attacks
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Inciting To Murder
From David Neiwert over at C&L
No doubt somebody at the RNC thought it would be a clever idea, since Nancy Pelosi is feuding with the CIA, to run an ad comparing Pelosi to a James Bond villainess up against the superspy -- as in Bond's many screen-credit sequences wherein he blasts away at various villains.You would think, somewhere, someone would have suggested that maybe having a sequence where we look at Pelosi down the barrel of a gun, hear shots fired, and then watch blood drip down our screens wasn't exactly the smartest or most responsible way to try and get your point across.
What is it about right-wingers and their Pelosi assassination fantasies anyway?
This is so twisted, it's perverted. If this is all the RNC has left, you know what evil, mean minded traitorous, seditious bastards they really are. Damned near every thing these people do these days is somehow geared toward inciting violence against our legally and duly constituted government, and the bastards do it, knowing that a large segment of what's left of their redneck trailer trash base is more than capable of acting out on it and ignorant enough to do so if their fearless leaders suggest it often enough.
Can someone be tried for inciting to murder... preferably BEFORE anyone gets murdered?
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Raw Story: Tough guy conservative Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller (who once said Howard Dean was "vile," "bloodthirsty," "evil" and "should be kicked out of America) had himself waterboarded to prove it isn't torture. Well....now he says it is torture.
A couple points from John Cole:
1.) I'm not sure why we have to keep waterboarding wingnut radio hosts to prove that torture is in fact torture, but this is just starting to get silly. How many times have we now waterboarded someone like this to prove what we have known all along - that waterboarding is torture.
2.) One of the things that supposedly separates humans from other animals is that we are able to learn from the experiences of other people. Apparently this ability is not available to right-wing radio hosts.
3.) Not to diminish Mancow's experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man's switch like Hitchens did, you have no "safe" word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.
Of course it is torture. I'm sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.
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I can't wait to see what Michael Moore does with the Wall Street bozos: (Reuters) - Firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore, who targeted the Bush administration in "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the healthcare industry in "Sicko," is now focusing on the global economic meltdown.
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Krugman on healthcare reform:
"We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system," says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that's true, why don't you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it's really that bad?
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Bush says cleaning up his dog's droppings is a sobering reminder that he's no longer president. Obama says cleaning up the Bush administration's droppings is a sobering reminder that he is.
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On NBC's Today Show this morning, Robert Gates said that Obama has ordered him to update the plans for a US attack on Iran, plans which were last updating during the Bush Administration. Gates says the plans are "refreshed" and insists that "all options are on the table" with respect to the potential attack.
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Senate passes $91.3 billion war funding bill.
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Last night on CNN, Cheney's daughter Liz revealed that fear of prosecution is indeed a motivating factor in the former vice president's current media campaign:
L. CHENEY: I don't think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.
Does Liz Cheney also fear that her dad will be prosecuted for his role in the Bush administration's torture program? Perhaps so. As Steve Benen has noted, "Liz Cheney has been all over the television news" as well, with "12 appearances, in nine and a half days, spanning four networks."
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Rush Limbaugh—drug addict, Viagra user - isn't in a position to mock other people's appearance. But that didn't stop him from suggesting that posting a photo of Nancy Pelosi in "every cheap hotel room in America" would cut the birth rate—because, hey, no man could get it up with Pelosi's ugly mug in the room, right? Ron Reagan Jr. bashes back:
"Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection—none of that stuff—to me, off limits until! until! Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else—once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too."
Reagan added that Limbaugh looks like "the unholy spawn of Tony Soprano and the Michelin Man."
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