Happy now?

Is the Gulf of Mexico becoming the cesspool of the Oil business; the repository of all the spills resulting from accidents, neglect, irresponsible drilling and all the other inevitable situations we refuse to listen to while sneering at "enviros" and calling for more oil whatever the cost?

Sure it is, but we may just be beginning to give a damn, now that it's appearing that many of us won't live to see that section of the great mother of life, the World Ocean, and it's shorelines restored to any kind of health.

We have another gusher, apparently. Just off the coast near New Orleans where a barge has reportedly crashed into a well spilling more oil just where we need it least and just where we have our equipment otherwise occupied. It hasn't been the first time, and it won't be the last, but maybe now we're starting to realize that you can't get all the world's oil out of the ground without the nasty consequences we've been ignoring. You can't transport it by ship or by pipeline and you can't pump it without leaks and spills and fires and of course, loss of life.

Yes, that's right, you're paying three bucks a gallon -- much, much less than other countries do and all our efforts to ruin what's left of what's worth keeping in our country aren't going to reduce that price. It's all going to get worse until you start listening to those hippie, treehugging, sandal wearing weirdos and stop listening to the bought and paid for politicians who refuse to do a damned thing that might stop the campaign contributions and free propaganda that keep them in office. The rich TV blowhards, your friends, your neighbors and all their stupid stories about vast reserves of oil ready to pour into your tanks if only the government and those environmental freaks would let our friends at Exxon sell it to China and Japan at a higher price than we want to pay.

I'd like to blame it all on Republicans, like the ones in Florida who refuse to take any steps whatever to keep the oil off our shores ( or the industrial and agricultural waste that poison our inland waters) but even the President we elected in our naivete, thinking that he could be immune, has been tainted.

Oil corrupts. Big oil corrupts big time, whether it's in Nigeria, Venezuela or Iraq. It's corrupted us and has corrupted presidents since the Harding administration. But before you think I'm going into another partisan rant, think again. It's us - it's you who elect these people. It's the American people, the snickering snarky states of America looking for scapegoats while we support the Palins and the McCains and the Cheneys and the Bush's who tell us we need more oil and that we need only to disregard all prudence to get and use more of it and faster. Yes, they either bought or bamboozled Obama into thinking it was all so safe despite the shaky safety record and now they want you to forget that we all cooperated in eliminating all traces of safety standards -- you know, the things we've been dumb enough to see as "Communism." It's us, the soccer moms, the commuters, the SUV fashionistas who don't think past our daily concerns and laugh at the concept of giving a damn about the future. You wanted oil and you've got oil. Are you happy now?

Too much business

It's one of those things many Obama supporters hoped he would do, and do quickly. It's also one of those things nobody should have expected him to be able to do given any amount of time. I'm talking about the malignant, corrupting influence of unfettered, and unlimited lobbying.

Amidst the chorus singing about too much government influence in the oil industry being the culprit in the Gulf Oil Disaster (along with the president, of course) isn't it time to listen to the quiet voices trying to remind us that it's too much business involvement in Government that's corrupting both sectors? Of course they're quiet only in comparison, because the volume of noise is directly proportional to the volume of oil bucks and Gas bucks and the volume of Republican/Corporate money wells pumping away at the opportunity to make even more through more obfuscation and deregulation.

If The Washington Post has it right and 3 out of 4 oil and gas lobbyists were formerly part of the Federal Government, we have to believe that congress isn't going to find fault with a practice that can offer lucrative employment to the departing congressman or the promise of election support that opens the spigot of campaign financing from those industries. No, I don't see Obama doing much about it. In fact I don't see us or anyone else doing much about it. We just can't afford to compete.

Consider the source

So how long did you think it would take? Actually I'm surprised that Chairman Rush took so long to blame the oil rig disaster on "hardcore environmentalist wackos." He couldn't have been waiting for some evidence before making accusations of murder and terrorism since there hasn't been any and he's never let that bother him before. Besides he isn't actually making any accusations in the first place:

"I'm just, I'm just noting the timing here."

It happened on Earth Day of course. It's always so easy to say "case closed" when there isn't any case so I won't even hint that Halliburton, the recipient of unholy amounts of government subsidies, grants and contracts and with strong ties to Dick Cheney is handling the capping of the well. I'll just note who's getting rich from it.

It didn't take long either, for the "government can't be trusted" set to pledge their trust to the Arizona police never to define their "reasonable suspicion" in a way that lets them stop and harass American citizens of Hispanic origin or Hispanics with legal work papers. They don't have to worry at all, though they should be sure to have witnesses standing by, to never go out of the house without proof of citizenship and to be very, very polite to Sheriff Arpaio when he demands they stand and deliver.

There's simply no reason to worry about abuse except that the recently signed bill seems to have been drafted by Kris Kobach who is a lawyer from the Federation for American Immigration Reform , which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as an anti-immigrant hate group since 2007 and who was former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s top immigration adviser. Hey, I'm not suggesting anything, but Ashcroft isn't known for respecting the niceties of Constitutional law in matters concerning the Bill of Rights. So maybe it's constitutional, maybe it's not, maybe it's going to be hell for Hispanics in Arizona, maybe not, but I'll simply consider the source.

Let's pity the victim

There should be an emoticon for a dumbfounded guffaw or something less childishly vulgar than WTF? to express my reaction to Michael Steele's attempt to make himself a martyr instead of a hypocrite. It would save so many keystrokes.

It takes a desperate man and a little man to dismiss the scorn over his involvement with the kinky strip club incident GOP contributors unknowingly funded. There's something distinctly oily about his assertion that he has a "slimmer margin of error" as a black man, even though that might be true in general.

"It's a different role for me to play and others to play and that's just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it"

he explained on Good Morning America this morning.

Whether or not he actually is held to a higher standard than a non-African American in his position as RNC Chairman would be, that frisky business is certainly at a level where anyone would be condemned for it and above the level where a white Democratic president might be impeached for it.

Yes, it's true that an honest politician (we're speaking hypothetically here) has to walk on eggs, so to speak and it's true that one of a minority group has to have even more delicate toes, but that certainly doesn't apply to a gleeful romp in the slime bucket, does it Mr. Steele? Falsely posing as a victim doesn't help real victims either.

If Gore had won Kentucky. . .

That Al Gore lost the state of Kentucky in the 2000 Presidential election was a bit of a surprise to some of us. Polls had him up as much as 8%, but of course he lost that state and his loss was accompanied by jeers, of course. Republicans love to hate Al Gore although some have since begun to love Lieberman. They'd also love to forget all the accusations of voter fraud and the way they excoriated all who were suspicious that those voting machines with no means to check whether they had been hacked or not might have in fact, been tampered with in several states. Sore losers, we were called by the smug victors who currently are sore losers to the point of threatening us all with violence and insurrection.

In a country with a memory, the mockery might haunt Republicans, but of course they live in the moment and reality is created anew every day to suit each day's requirements. The conviction of a former judge and seven others on Thursday gives renewed strength to the argument that the electoral victory in 2000 and perhaps the Bush-Kerry contest were influenced or decided by corrupt Republicans. former Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle and former school Superintendent Douglas C. Adams along with five others were convicted of a federal racketeering conspiracy and several of them of other charges, including mail fraud, extortion and laundering the money that was used to buy votes.

Some of the juries are still out but the mockery, the Liberal bashing, the accusations of treason are sounding more and more off key as we move forward from the 8 year reign of the Right and we have to speculate on what might have been, for better or for worse if the corrupt and unscrupulous, with all the lip service paid to freedom, had had respect for the law and tolerance of Democracy.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

And he said unto them that stood by, Take away from him the pound, and give it unto him that hath the ten pounds.

-Luke 19:24-

Once upon a time there were people who would lend you money at high rates of interest. We called them loan sharks and we put them in jail if we could catch them. We had usury laws to protect the public from being forced into ruinous transactions. We were just inches away from Marxism.

Then came the deregulators who told us that it was toxic government interference and was depriving us of our "freedoms" to apply the same laws to that class of supercitizens known as corporations and so now we are free to borrow at rates Don Corleone wished he could have charged. Sure, some states jumped in and capped payday loans and the government "protected" the military from being charged more than 36%, but of course that's an outrageous assault on our "freedoms" and sure enough, the lobbyists came out of the woodwork and bought themselves a House subcommittee which went to work legitimizing loans with a 391% APR. For many in the payday loan business, that's not enough.

H.R. 1214 introduced earlier this year by Congressman Rep. Luis "dances with jackals" Gutiérrez [D-IL4] is still in committee. Yes, Luis is a Democrat, let's give credit where it's due and Luis, who rose from poor Hispanic roots in Chicago promising to help others like him is now the champion of legalized juice loans and the big banks that screw the little guy in a big way.

The congressman got into trouble last year for getting a $200,000.00 loan from a contractor for whom he had intervened with the zoning board, but I'm sure he isn't paying 391%. A competing bill from Congressman Joe Baca would prevent States from capping rates at all and would allow much larger add-on fees and charges, but the really great feature would allow you to roll over the loan indefinitely, racking up that 400% or so until you're forced to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us who aren't desperate enough with trying to pay medical bills and mortgages we can't afford, the Credit companies are out to protect our freedom too. Faced with having to warn us they're tightening the screws in the near future, they're tightening them now without warning. I got a letter yesterday from my friendly MasterCard folk ( I won't mention the name but it rhymes with Citibank) informing me that since I've been such a good customer for 25 years and always paid the full balance on time, they would raise my interest rates to over 20%. Well to tell the truth there was a time or two when I got the un-postmarked bill on or after the due date although the last two times they tried that I'd switched to e-bills and had documentary proof that they sent the bill too late to be paid on time. They refunded the charges which would have amounted to nearly 100%, but I never got an apology for their attempt at petty larceny and I don't expect a letter of appreciation for my part ( and yours) in bailing them out when they choked on their own greed.

Yes, I know, when the Republicans justify their crimes by insisting the Democrats aren't pure at heart either, they don't avoid the guilt, but they're not always lying.

He must be wrong -- he's Obama.

It seems to me that if one is dedicated to thwarting president Obama's health care reform before one knows what it is, then one has to admit that either he's out to thwart anything Obama does, or any kind of health care reform.

Multimillionaire Rick Scott is one of those people who can't wait to hear what the plan actually entails before putting on the Drum Major costume and strutting about the streets twirling his baton in ostentatious outrage and ornate opposition. He has put together a group he predictably calls Conservatives for Patients Rights rather than a more honest "The I've Got Mine and F*ck You Club."

"Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care,"

says Scott as quoted in today's Washington Post. Of course since we don't know that Obama is actually talking about Government run health care, at least not in the same sense that Scott would like us to fear he is, the mendacity begins with the first words. Then too, he doesn't want you to ask Americans who have government run health care either. By all accounts our politicians have it pretty good and the VA system was a model of efficiency, at least until the privatization pirates attempted to board that ship. He doesn't want you to listen to countries with successful and popular health care plans, he wants you to listen to a carefully selected and edited group of Canadians and Brits and their anecdotal horror stories and so enter CRC Public Relations and another round of captious TV ads.

Did I mention that Scott made his money as CEO of a private hospital business?

Scott is contributing $5 million from his own piggy bank and has, according to WaPo, got $15 million more from other people who support the status quo most Americans feel is in need of reform. The funds will be put to good use by CRC Public Relations, the same firm that gave us the "swift Boat Veterans" campaign that convinced the weak minded and no-minded that John Kerry was not where he was, didn't do what he did and proved it with testimony from people who didn't know him and were never near him.

Did I mention that CEO Scott was ousted from Columbia/HCA, the largest private U.S. health-care company at the time, that pleaded guilty to fraud? He defends this by telling us that other private hospitals were committing fraud too. Think about that when the argument comes around to the part where private is always better than public.

If you took logic 101 in college, you probably remember it being called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but Scott's target audience didn't go and doesn't remember and so Scott can employ the argument that any step toward reform will accelerate down hill without evidence. He can tell us he isn't necessarily opposed to Obama's plan, even before he knows what it is, but that

"The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path"

but what he means by "debate" is to obfuscate -- and that's obvious. We have had decades of debate; decades of millions spent on sleazy ads and slimy lies and distractions and Scott thinks we need to continue the gravy train he's on as long as he can keep it going.

He's OUT!

It was unanimous; Rod's out and Quinn's in.

Bye-Bye Blogojevich, seeya later old boyavich. Actually I hope not. The defiant Rod, who was portraying himself in dramatic fashion today as a victim of his own excellence, Was stripped of his job and title this evening by the Illinois Senate in a 59 - 0 vote and Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, Blagojevich's two-time running mate, has been sworn in as the state of Illinois' 41st governor. I never heard him say "so help me God" either. I can't wait to see if Fox News will accept him.

Blogo commuted the sentences of two felons just before he left the building, one is a convicted drug dealer who now works as a janitor in the same homeless shelter Mrs. Blogojevich once worked at. His record will be wiped clean and he may well deserve it.

The other is a crooked real estate tycoon who was convicted of theft back in the 1980's. He recently bought Oprah's farm in Indiana, so he can't be doing all that badly. I wonder why he deserves the special favor, don't you?

Anyway, cold as it may be in Springfield, it's time to open the windows and air the place out -- and maybe to count the silverware.

This seat's for sale

Let's hear it for young Rod Blagojevich,
Put his state up for sale, oh boyavich!
They surely won't fail
To put him in jail,
Where his cellmate will make him a a toyovich.

Operation Iraqi fiefdom

So the government of Iraq is sovereign? Well obviously not when it comes to being able to ask an occupying army to leave or to make Iraqi law apply to their actions or being able to tell foreign powers and their carpetbaggers that no, they can't just come in and take their only natural resource.

In case you haven't been reading the papers, one of the architects of our conquest of Iraq, Richard Perle, has been making oil deals which include a venture near the Kurdish city of Erbil. Needless to say Iraq, to whom this area allegedly belongs and who is trying to put together legislation affirming its ownership of its resources, is displeased. Of course he's not the first and not the only entity with close ties to President Bush to attempt to circumvent US policy and Iraqi law for private gain. The State Department is investigating, but one expects nothing to come of it as long as the carpetbagger oil men themselves run our country.

Perle, together with Turkish AG Group International, has been talking with Kurdish officials and with Kazakhstan's ruthless and corrupt dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been involved in a US oil bribery investigation about all kinds of oil deals. Mr. Perle, who began pushing an attack on Iraq nearly 10 years ago and who invented dishonest scenarios including Saddam Hussein dancing around the maypole with Osama bin Laden to justify it all, calls Nazarbayev "visionary and wise," says The Wall Street Journal. Sometimes words fail me.

Will a Department of State under another Republican president continue not to object to such imperial appropriation of another country's resources while continuing to sell that country as an independent nation struggling for freedom against foreign enemies? Who knows, but Mr. McCain has not said much other than to talk about "victory" and "surrender" nor has he any record of maintaining a consistent position for very long.

But unless you're looking for this sort of news, you won't be aware of it and you'll probably buy into the comic opera scenario they've been presenting for 7 years. You'll be made far more aware of the fist bumps and the funny sounding middle name of the other candidate. You'll wave the flag and talk about honor while your country becomes another corrupt and greedy empire pushing its will on the world through fear and force of arms.

Raiders of the lost recount.

I've yet to read any reviews of HBO's latest creation Recount. It's about the deep, wide and muddy river of corruption that runs through Southern politics and about how democracy was torn from the banks and washed away while America looked the other way or snickered or gloated -- or participated in what may have been the most shameful election meddling in the last 50 years.

The reviews, I'm certain, will fault it for bias, because it damns the Bush organization and the Florida political machine of Jeb Bush. They're certain to say that it's fiction, loosely based on the truth and that there are (hold your nose) always two sides to a story.

There aren't, of course. There's the truth and as many lies as there are liars to tell them and truth is not to be found by bracketing it with lies or finding the mean between the false extremes. It's not fiction that Katherine Harris, who represented both the State of Florida and George Bush's campaign, used $4 million dollars to commission a list of names similar to the names of convicted felons and without confirming the data or informing anyone on the list, used it to turn away tens of thousands of registered voters from the polls without letting them cast provisional ballots. It's not bias to assert that she used every trick she could employ to stall and obfuscate the recount she was required by law to make.

It's not fiction that 80 years of precedent was overturned and replaced by contrived new rules for counting ballots. It's not fiction that minority voters in Florida were warned by people identifying themselves as State Police to stay away from the polls. The infamous butterfly ballots that the nattering nitwits on Fox told us were without problems had major problems. I have 20:20 vision and had difficulty making them line up properly and difficulty making the worn and dull stylus punch cleanly and even in being sure the beat up machine was holding the ballot properly. If you want to believe I can't read or that I think Pat Buchanan is a Democrat or that I'm just plain stupid, go ahead -- but you know better. This is, however, the age of marketing magic and with a wave of the wand and a flap of the jawbone it all becomes the result of stupid, old (the same thing) grandmothers who can't follow instructions and unsavory far left liberal America hating effete Volvo driving welfare abusing Democrats.

It's not fiction that recounts weren't performed as requested, that gangs of Republican thugs, flown in from out of state by courtesy of Bush's best friends at Enron, physically halted the Miami-Dade recount or that the legally mandated recount was deliberately stalled by Republican operatives so as to run out the clock.

It's not fiction that The Republicans on the US Supreme Court recognized the unconstitutionality of this mess, but none the less permitted it "just this one time."

The 2 hour production did cover the invalidation and subsequent re-validation of absentee ballots that had no postmarks, no witnesses and no dates by Republican election commissioners anxious to obtain as many military votes as possible. It didn't mention my county where the Republican commissioner actually took the ballots home without supervision and decided on her own that they must have been valid. There were never any repercussions.

"Democrats go wah. They go wah wah wah" said Ann of the Thousand Lies. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a snicker.

2000 was the year I gave up on the United States of America and although I've since repented to a degree, I will never again have faith in the ability of our democratic Republic to operate as it was designed to do, free of the ability of entrenched power to bend it to their will and against the will and control of the electorate. Since that day, the ability of our government to control what we know, what we believe, and whether or not our votes get counted has grown further. Their power to know what we read and who we talk to has grown and their power to create false history is unmitigated and all but unchallenged.

Recount ends with a dolly shot of a vast warehouse full of boxes containing all the Florida ballots and perhaps it deliberately parallels the famous final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, slowly revealing, as the camera recedes, the vastness of the endless stacks of crates of artifacts relegated to the dust and official oblivion. It's a metaphor -- a powerful one.

It's not hard to look at history and see the pivotal moments when civilizations begin to fail, governments begin to fall and liberty begins an inexorable slide into the spider hole of authoritarianism and corruption. So far, the presidential election of 2000 seems likely to feature as such in some future volume of the Decline and Fall of the United States of America.

More of the same McCain part II

I have no idea whether Rush Limbaugh's "endorsement" of Hillary Clinton had any effect, but her quasi-comeback will ensure that the round the clock circus of opinions of opinions of polls and portents will continue to make it impossible to get any actual news from that big box in my living room. I've had TV since 1949 and I don't recall anything this obsessive.

At least the Republican nomination is no longer at issue. John McCain is set to receive the official endorsement today of the man who has endorsed more crooks, liars, con men and incompetents than any US President I know of. I expect Mr. Strait Talk to accept humbly and without the scathing denunciation no decent candidate could fail to administer. He's a team player, after all and the Republicans respect that same Omerta; the code of silence that provides a modicum of honor amongst thieves.

So I'm sure we'll see him cuddle up to Bush and we will continue to witness that Kabuki theater of the Party's reaction to the horrible, terrible, unforgivable smear the New York Times printed about John's relationship to a lobbyist whose clients had business before his Senate Committee and we'll continue to hear next to nothing about how he accepted a large amount of money to intervene in regulatory matters in behalf of Charles Keating of crooked Savings and Loan debacle and "family Values" fame. After all that is all in the past and irrelevant, unlike Whitewater.

The Maverick Reformer, far too "liberal" for many of the fat toads in the Republican cistern, has been chastised for his bipartisan campaign finance reform bill, but never fear. At heart it never meant anything. Setting up The Reform Institute with one hand while drafting legislation with the other shows it. The Reform Institute is a great sump of unregulated soft money from such benefactors as cable companies represented by - you guessed it.

Who cares if he was shagging "honorable lobbyist" Vicky Iseman? He's been screwing us all right and left and all the mugging and grimacing and liberal bashing; all the howls of outrage and accusation are a distraction from the obvious fact that John "Strait Talk" McCain is just another lie, cheat, steal, borrow and spend Republican confidence trickster. Let's hope his flag pin doesn't poke him in the chest when he hugs George today.

Cross posted from The Impolitic

Lott's lot

Well whaddaya know - Trent Lott is going to resign from Congress today, cheap wig and all -- or so the news is being told. Is it because, as he says, he wants to spend more time with the family or is he scurrying down the dock lines like a bilge rat before he's outed or indicted? Or is it just so that he can escape new and improved ethics laws that would require him to wait two years before getting on the Washington lobbyist gravy train? Maybe it's all of the above, but it's definitely good riddance.

Yellow Peril

The line between hyperbole and slander may be hazy, but it is there and it is regularly crossed. The USA, being in dire need of external enemies that can be used to distract us from the self destruction we're engaged in, is far from scrupulous when it comes to accurately portraying that vast and growing country upon which we have become heavily dependent: China, or as Lou Dobbs loves to call that authoritarian capitalist nation in order to invoke those dear dead cold war days, Communist China.

Today's New York Times gives us three inflammatory cartoons. One shows a giant and horrifying dragon in the form of a jack-in-the-box toy looming over two terrified children and with a caption reading "Chinese business ethics." Another shows a man trying to commit suicide by playing with a "made in China" toy and a third is a scene of smiling Chinese workers, some in Mao hats, making poison filled toys. It's titled Santa's Little Helpers.

Dangerous toys used to be a pet theme amongst left-leaning Americans in the last century. Television specials, holiday horror stories and endless Saturday Night Live skits portrayed unscrupulous and greedy capitalists as child murderers, but in our new Corporatocracy, it's been turned around with the help of hyperbole and hysteria and some good old fashioned xenophobic lying. It doesn't matter that the levels of lead we're talking about would only be dangerous if your child were to eat Thomas the Tank Engine for breakfast every morning for years and it doesn't matter that domestic food is as likely or more likely to be contaminated as is Chinese fish, it's so much more fun to externalize the dark side of unregulated capitalism then to face it.

In fact, the problems with Chinese goods have been due to that country's explosion into crony capitalism and our country's relapse into crony capitalism where regulatory agencies are seen as the enemy not the protector of the consumer and staffed with republican hacks. That doesn't stop cartoonists from depicting thirteen hundred million people as evil, Fu Manchu inspired enemies without "business ethics" while neglecting to note that the Asiatic entrepreneurs who cut corners or who were duped into buying tainted commodities by other unscrupulous entrepreneurs have either been shot in the back of the head by the Chinese justice system or killed themselves before facing the firing squad, whilst those charged with protecting the American public rarely face any consequences at all.

Interviews of the thousands of Chinese workers now out of a job and furious at their greedy employers and their incompetent regulatory agencies aren't as satisfying to our bigotry as racist cartoons or moldy old references to Communism and the Yellow Peril. When your Sony goes dark and is unrepairable the day after the warranty ends, you usually blame Sony, not the Japanese people. You don't make grotesque cartoons of sneaky Japanese workers plotting to ruin your day. We've learned that such things aren't socially acceptable, but that still doesn't apply to China. Some company makes a fast buck from substituting Glycol for glycerin and it's just fine to draw pigtailed bucktoothed caricatures of The Chinese.

Nobody in the US blamed American workers or capitalism itself when Ford Explorers shredded their right rear tires and went out of control into roadside ditches or when Ford Pintos blew up when hit from behind or when Tylenol started appearing with cyanide in it or when massive quantities of foodstuffs tainted with mercury, salmonella and e-coli endangered the public health, or when some diet drug or arthritis drug or diabetes drug gave you a heart attack. We wouldn't laugh at cartoons showing Americans smiling while putting Vioxx into bottles with skull and crossbones on them. Just keep laughing and remember when hiding your head in the sand, to keep your eyes closed.

The right to sell and distribute arms

The people who prattle about the ease of obtaining non-automatic assault rifle look-alikes in the US should perhaps look at how easy it is for international arms dealers to move large quantities of real military hardware. The US, China, Russia and a host of other shady entities are selling weapons to anyone who wants them, or so it seems.

A secret $40 million deal to sell Russian-made weapons: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and 5,000 PKM machine guns to Iraq without the US knowing about it, was just broken up in Italy by a task force investigating the Mafia. Does our pet government in Iraq want to use them against insurgents or does it want to sell them to insurgents, terrorists and militias? Despite our coy outrage about Iranian weapons coming into Iraq, there seem to be US weapons being used by other militias against the theoretically friendly government of Turkey and the less friendly government of Iran. No one seems to know where the 190,000 assault rifles and automatic pistols we lost track of went, or where the large inventory of explosives and weapons the US didn't think worth guarding went, but it's easy to imagine that they didn't wind up in the hands of the Iraqi army and police. It's easy to imagine that all these Russian weapons will disappear or be traded in when the US fulfills its plan to replace them with American Made M16's. It's not hard to imagine that the black market will swell like a two day old corpse in the Iraqi sun with Kalashnikovs for sale. It's hard to imagine that making Iraq a vast dumping ground for arms is doing much to stabilize the country or the larger theater of operations.

"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S. Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian or Chinese weapons through questionable channels,"

said the Italian prosecutor. Yes it does, unless you're aware that the Raison d'être of the war on terror is to sell weapons and other hardware and services and to enrich various companies like the Carlyle group, Halliburton, Blackwater and all the middle men and smugglers and politicians and industrialists who get rich from the destruction and fear they spread.

Giving arms to those who can't afford it and then selling arms to those who then need to protect themselves from the people we arm; arming repressive dictatorships and arming the resistance movement; selling to our allies and to the people who oppose them. We pay for the guns, they keep the profits.

Bits and pieces

The family that strafes together stays together? Seems odd, but then this is a story about Republicans. This August in Manchester, New Hampshire Republicans with 25 bucks to spend will get to bring the wife and kids to a family machine gun shoot. "It's a fun day. It's a family day," said the organizer, Jerry Thibodeau of the August 5 event. "It's quite exciting."

I'll bet it is. Politically I think it's sheer idiocy, but as a way of letting Republicans feel macho without sending others to kill and be killed, it's great. The Brady Bunch is making much of the "ease" of purchasing a handgun in New Hampshire, there being no requirement to register it with the police, but of course they don't ask whether one is safer in that rural state than in Brooklyn with its handgun ban.

They finally subpoenaed Michael Moore for filming in Cuba, although many of my European friends and relatives have taken vacations there. It feels good to live in a free country, doesn't it - where the White House plutocrats get free medical care and the New York Firemen Bush posed with get more smoke.

"Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow." Says the New York Times today, quoting Bush administration officials. Our Allies and Bush business partners seem to be supporting Sunni interests in opposition to our supposed puppet Maliki. A senior official declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.” So when is an insurgent not an insurgent? Sounds like a job for the Decider, but I'll bet it has something to do with the Bush family business interests. Otherwise it would be hard to understand why we attacked Iraq to retaliate for an attack by Saudis and why we are itching to attack Iran for supporting insurgents without worrying about "disagreements."

Does anyone else think Sleazy Gonzales will soon be handed the medal of Freedom and shown the back door? ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!

What did you expect?

Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals

Judge John D. Bates helped Kenn Starr go after Bill Clinton. Judge John D. Bates allowed Dick Cheney to keep his secrets about the Energy Task Force and is now a close associate of Chief Justice Roberts. What did you expect?

Wasn't he just the man to dismiss Valerie Plame's suit against the White House gang over their use of executive powers in a private vendetta against her husband?

They keep it all hid. They have all the bases covered. Look out kid.

While you wait

Is Commander Guy's sinister sidekick suffering from vascular dementia or is he sliding into paranoid schizophrenia? Is he simply so sure of himself that he offers an excuse so laughably flimsy for refusing to turn over documents as claiming he isn't part of the Executive Branch? Is he trying to point out the impotence of the Public when it comes to taking a renegade administration to task? Maybe it's both. Maybe he's the head of a new branch that makes the other three branches subordinate: Halliburton, but with Cheney's perennial contempt for being asked what the hell he's doing by people with the constitutional right to ask it, all avenues of speculation lead to comedy of one sort or another.

But while we're waiting to see whether his diseased heart will last as long as this diseased administration and wondering whether we or the Shadow will ever know what evil lurked there, we can entertain ourselves with the documentation of decades of secrets about CIA murders, assassinations, thefts, burglaries, illegal wiretapping, kidnapping, infiltration and surveillance galore. It seems that all the things we hippies, subversives, conspiracy theorists and leftist, pinko paranoids once said the government was doing were pretty much true and more like understatement than hyperbole. It's all due to come out next week when the CIA is planning at long last to air enough dirty laundry to stink up the solar system.

I will try to avoid smirking while we read about it; while the remaining true believers try to think of excuses. I'll try not to say I told you so and I will try not to get the dry heaves this coming Independence day when we go through the annual rituals, ceremonies and parades of self praise. I will recall, through the rockets' red glare that people are suffering and dying while yet another generation of evil men sit on the truth and tell lies.

Lil' Bush

Comedy Central's Lil' Bush isn't funny, or at least that's the news from the bunker states like Utah. Utah, of course isn't known as the mother of a thousand comics, nor is any place known for religiosity and Republican politics also known for thriving comedy clubs. The mocking of heretics, homosexuals, Democratic candidates and minorities seems to fill the niche.

But I didn't come to bury Donick Cary's new cartoon series but to praise it. It may in fact be "mean-spirited, ugly, amateurish, vulgar and unwatchable" but when it takes aim at Bush, there's something refreshing in seeing the characters we suspect of being the inner children of the little club that's ruined the world biting the heads off of birds (Lil' Cheney,) or trying to get Lil' Bush to smooch (Lil' Condy.)

Wednesday's episode, wherein the Lil' Republican rascals run off to Baghdad to find a present for Daddy Bush in the form of some "good news" reveals that there is no good news for anyone but Halliburton and after a bit of slaughter they can only find a maimed little boy they nickname "lamey" to bring back to Washington in a box. Dad Bush doesn't know what to make of the present and is relieved to toss him, crutches and all in the garbage after moronic Lil' Jeb accidentally breaks his neck.

Yes, as many reviews point out, it takes "liberties with the truth" but that's what satire is about and perhaps treating the House of Bush in this trenchant fashion makes it more revealing of inner ugliness than the House of Usher with its hidden, Gothic horrors. It's the use of sarcastic humor, albeit cruel, mean and ugly, that allows us to deal with the dimwitted Decider, the greedy, inhuman prince of darkness Cheney and their familiars. Perhaps as with any Medusa, you can't really look at such a hideous visage directly.

The picaresque first episode uses a competition to get the first kiss of youth as the grail the Weeble-like characters seek while destroying lives to get it. I think actually, that it's far more kind to show them thus: as childish, self involved innocents with undeveloped consciences, than to show them as they really are: childish, self involved sociopaths with undeveloped consciences, up to their knees in blood in their quest for power, glory and riches.

Cross-posted at The Reaction

Irrelevant

The Holy office in Washington can't tolerate criticism, but because nearly every negative criticism one might make has a good chance of being valid and because to all appearances, the ineptitude, corruption and blind pursuit of a fable deliberately created to promote tyranny, involves more ineptitude, blindness and corruption than we can imagine, they have no choice but to rely on good old argumentum ad hominem.

It's hard to bring the standard charges of unpatriotic thought against former president Jimmy Carter. The customary swift boat might just be so excessive that the attempt would backfire. His moral credentials are pretty good and his dedication to improving America and promoting honesty and justice in the world aren't easily dismissed, so the only practical fall-back position open to the White House Wizards of sleaze is to lump him and his angry denunciations into the same category they put us all in. It's the category of Irrelevance. It's a club called "we don't care what you think."

If Carter calls the Bush administration the worst in history, it's close enough to the truth for all purposes. An administration that is willing to denounce the opinion of about three quarters of the electorate as irrelevant if not treasonous, makes Carters case for him. In fact all that keeps George W. Bush from irrelevance is the fact that he is armed and we are not. He holds the gun to the heads of our troops - criticize and they will die. He has the power to make us disappear into the gulag, to hire his own army, to spy, to torture, to set aside the law. He alone is the State and we, along with our principles, laws and aspirations are irrelevant.

Jimmy Carter is right and most of us know it. The only relevant questions are about how long we will permit this to continue. Will we have to wait until 2008 and hope that we will be allowed to vote him out of office or will we be able to say sic semper tyrannus sooner by impeaching him now?