Shakesville

Gettin' Chilly Down There...

The Washington Monthly has a series of columns up discussing why the Republicans should lose and be removed in 2006.

Written by conservatives.

Christoper Buckley, Bruce Bartlett (who, unlike Sean Hannity, doesn't think keeping Pelosi from becoming Speaker is worth dying for), William Niskanen, Bruce Fein, Jeffrey Hart, Richard Viguerie and Joe Scarborough all weigh in.

Scarborough:

As a political junkie who wept bitter tears the night Jimmy Carter got elected and shouted with uncontrolled joy when Ronald Reagan whipped his sorry ass four years later, I find myself ambivalent for the first time over a national election. After six years of Republican recklessness at home and abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the aforementioned Bourbon Street hookers could spend this country any deeper into debt than my Republican Party. With any luck, Democrats will launch destructive investigations, a new era of bad feelings will break out, and George W. Bush will stop using his veto pen to fill in Rangers’ box scores and instead start using it like a conservative president should.

Check 'em out.

Fuck Your Way to Tolerance

Well, this is certainly a new twist on the Women-Are-Just-Sirens-Who-Distract-Men-From-Their-Real-Pursuits meme:

A Russian mayor has called for prostitution to be made legal in a bid to wipe out a rising tide of extremism.

Igor Shpektor, mayor of Vorkuta, said it would give men another way to spend their time rather than getting involved in racist attacks.

He said: "Legalising prostitution would give men an opportunity within the law to address their emotions sexually with a provided service rather than expressing them in the form of xenophobia and extremism."

And he added: "All the women providing the service would of course receive full state protection and a full pension."

Russia has recently seen a sharp rise in violent crimes committed by racist extremists.

A woman’s work is never done. Clean the house, rear the children, use their vaginas as hypnotic distraction to deter men from violence.

I’ll leave you to discuss the many curious aspects of this proposal in comments, although I will note that I find myself torn between identifying as naively hopeful and utterly foolish the notion that miscreants who beat the crap out of people just because they look different are likely to substitute sex for such indecent behavior—not to mention that they’d miraculously use sex with a paid partner as a healthy expression of emotion. Yeah, because prostitutes never get knocked around by assholes.

Trigger's Getting Nervous...

Because they're going to need a few more dead horses soon; these are beaten to the bone. From yesterday's ~~bullshit session~~ press briefing with Tony Snow:

Q Even at that, you don't think it's -- so did the President fail in his mission?

MR. SNOW: No, I don't think so. It's interesting, we're going to have a lot of political conflict this year. Perfectly understandable, acceptable, predictable. That's the way it works. But yesterday gave the American people a chance to reflect on September 11th and how it froze us in an instant and made us understand that there was something out there we hadn't seen before, hadn't even expected, didn't have any suspicion that it existed. And that was a network of terrorists who would use any means possible, including things that are -- at least for you and me -- unimaginable, which was to turn airliners into weapons of mass destruction.

Yep, it's your friend and mine, the "unimaginable," "no one could have forseen" card.

Ahem.

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US

The following is a transcript of the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Parts of the original document were not made public by the White House for security reasons.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

[...]

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

Back to you, Tony.

It also revealed that there was an ideology abroad that said that freedom is a terrible thing and that people were going to twist and pervert the Koran in an attempt to create a holy war, when, in fact, theirs was an ideology of despotism and terror, and that they were serious about it; that they had plans; that they were organized and that they were trying to kill Americans. We all realize that. Before that day, I daresay very few people in this room were then focusing in any serious way on Osama bin Laden.

The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Well... I can think of one person who certainly wasn't focusing in any serious way on Osama bin Laden.

(Happy cross-posts to you... until we meet again...)

Your Moment of Zen

Via Monkeys for Helping.

I can’t wait to snag me a pedophile with my new padded bra!

Shaker Traddad pointed me in the direction of this Broadsheet story which seriously makes me want to hurl:

[H]ave you seen these Bratz dolls and their provocative underwear sets? These little pink and purple numbers include padded "bralettes" to better enhance your 6-year-old's cleavage. According to a piece in Saturday's Australian Herald Sun, these sets are for girls who are 6 and 7 years old. That's kindergarten, first grade, second grade, folks. And don't let the diminutive "bralette" fool you. These are brassieres. For Broadsheet readers who may not have experience with this: Girls that age do not typically wear bras. At all. Because they do not have breasts. Because they are children.

A spokeswoman from Bratz distributor Funtastic told the Herald Sun that the notion that the bras might sexualize children was silly. "The idea of the padding is for girls to be discreet as they develop ... It is more about hiding what you have got than showing it off." A Target spokesperson likewise argued that the padded bras "give girls modesty and style as they go through development changes." The message is that everyone should calm down: No one's trying to make your little girls voluptuous by selling them padded bras. They're just trying to make them feel shame about their bodies six years before puberty!

How on earth does faux cleavage confer modesty and style on a six-year-old? How does giving the illusion of breasts where there aren’t supposed to be any qualify as “discreet”? As Jessica says, “the idea of padded bras for little girls is beyond nasty to me—discreet my ass. If you need to cover up a six years-olds' non-breasts in order to feel like she's being "discreet," there's something wrong with the way you look at six year-old girls..” Indeed.

I’m also extremely troubled by the thought that pre-pubescent girls are being compelled to “hide” a lack of breasts, as if there’s something wrong with their bodies without them. Aside from the inevitable body image issues that will arise from such lunacy, it strikes me—as a girl who used to run around without a shirt all summer until I was about 9 and started getting breasts— as an infringement on their freedom, a liberty of which they might not even be aware. The lack of body consciousness I had at that age was brilliant, and I can’t imagine how my childhood would have been improved by taking away that complete, careless indulgence from me and replacing it with a shame for being perfectly normal.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dahl

I'll celebrate by picking up a Wonka bar on my lunch break.

LONDON (Reuters) - Children, parents, teachers and adult fans are throwing parties on Wednesday to celebrate what would have been the 90th birthday party of the darkly comic writer Roald Dahl.

"He understood children and identified with them. This is like a great big happy birthday party to acknowledge him," said his daughter Lucy, launching what she and others hope will be a day of improvised "Revolting Rhymes" and "Oompa Loompa" dances.

Exhibitions and children's reading campaigns are also being staged to commemorate Dahl, who died in 1990 and has now sold more than 100 million books in 40 languages.

I can't think of a Roald Dahl book that I didn't completely love. The Wonka books; James and the Giant Peach, The Witches... and the Twits! If you're a fan of short stories... I'm obsessed with them... you've got to pick up a collection of Dahl's "Tales of the Unexpected."

My favorite curmudgeon, and (in my opinion) the greatest Children's author, ever... the world is a better place because of Roald Dahl.

Wake Me When Your “Third Awakening” Is Over

Who needs gray when you’ve got black and white?

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."

…"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830.

The whole Good v. Evil thing is just all kinds of fucked up, especially coming from someone who has waged an illegal war that has spawned a whole new generation of terrorists and still firmly believes he’s the Good Guy. It’s a little more nuanced than that. But aside from the lack of necessary perspective from a technical standpoint, it’s bloody dangerous to identify terrorism as evil, which an irrational concept, when it is, irrespective of our president’s opinion, a rational act with identifiable motivations. There are causes of terrorism which can be addressed, and just because terrorists are despicable people who use horrendous tactics is not a justification for ignoring what induces them. In reality, dismissing terrorists as blindly evil is to suggest that there’s no solution to the problem except total annihilation, which is simply not even possible. Once again, Bush illustrates that he is patently incapable of engaging this complex problem with the rigorous intricacy it requires.

And once again, he gives us a peek into America’s future, were he left to his own devices to shape it:

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.

…In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war.

"He's drawing a parallel in terms of a resurgence, in dangerous times, of people going back to their religion," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was not open to other journalists. "This is not 'God is on our side' or anything like that."

The White House did not release a transcript of Bush's remarks, but National Review posted highlights on its Web site.

The Crusader-in-Chief’s simplistic and ugly agenda, framed by the black-and-white of his religion, is to be covertly disseminated in conservative media, while the White House pretends he’s still a reasonable man. Scary stuff. We’re being led by a religious fanatic who the mainstream media dutifully portrays as a “man of letters,” so those of us who pay attention can be marginalized as anti-religious nutcases when we dare to question whether it’s wise to have charged a religious zealot with leading a secular nation.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Addams Family

Some of My Best Friends...

I don't know if this is simply laughable, or just insulting.

George Allen threw himself a "Really, I'm not racist!" "ethnic rally."

No, really.
He's got pictures and video and everything. Wow, what a guy, huh?

Tip 'o the Energy Dome to Josh Marshall, who adds:

I guess 'ethnic rally' was better than 'brown people outreach' and that probably would have been better than 'macaca day'.

As the kids say, "Heh, indeed."

(Close, but no cross-post.)

Auugh

Just to increase my head pounding frustration, we find in this story discussing "Americans Split on Iraq as Part of the WOT:

A plurality of Americans, 43%, continue to believe that there were links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Thirty-two percent (32%) disagree while 25% are not sure. Once again, there are huge partisan divides on this question. By a 59% to 19% margin, Republicans say there were Iraqi-Al Qaeda links. Democrats disagree by a 46% to 34% margin.

Proving, of course, that even though the President may come out and explicitly say there is no link, by continually combining them in the rest of the discussion, the illusion remains.

It is becoming fucking impossible to battle the willfully ignorant.

The war on terror, stingray division

Guilt by association: Mourners of the death of the Crocodile Hunter apparently engage in revenge killings of innocent stingrays.

At least 10 stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on Australia's eastern coast since "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was killed by one of the animals last week, an official said Tuesday, prompting concerns of revenge attacks on the normally docile fish.
The popular television star was killed last week when a stingray barb pierced his chest as he filmed a TV show off Australia's Great Barrier Reef, prompting an outpouring of grief in Australia and among his fans worldwide.

The dead stingrays have been discovered on two beaches in Queensland state, including two that were found Tuesday with their tails lopped off, state fisheries department official Wayne Sumpton said.

Sumpton said fishermen who inadvertently catch the diamond-shaped rays sometimes cut off their tails to avoid being stung, but the practice is uncommon.

Steve Irwin wouldn't have wanted this kind of biological profiling and inter-species violence. We await a call for reason and compassion by Aussie Prime Minister John Howard, whose sensitivity is legendary.

(Cross-posted, and still in mourning...)

News from Shakes Manor

Things you learn from drunken Scotsmen:

1. Beer is good for your teeth because it’s enriched with fluoride. This is a Known Fact.

2. Beer is also good for your skin. The evidence? The perfect skin of Scotsmen.

3. BB guns purchased at K-Mart have enough fire power to hurt if shot at another Scotsman’s arse.

4. One scuffed jeans cuff is clear proof of having one leg longer than the other. Badly hemmed garments do not exist.

Today, Mr. Shakes and I and our guests—Mr. Shakes’ best mate and his girlfriend, visiting from Auld Reekie—are off to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium and continue our quest for beer and meat, so blogging will be a bit light again for my part.

Remind me, lest I forget, in coming days to post something about the insanity of watching 9/11 anniversary coverage with non-Americans. Oy.

Five years and counting

Like most everyone else, I expected a racheting-up of official national somberness for the first multiple-of-five anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Pentamerous anniversaries are always more meaningful than others. Additionally, the current state of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq required a renewed public call to something or other by the people who run those wars, and September 11 is a natural platform. Factor in also the upcoming Congressional elections and the deep political need to exploit that angst. And finally the hours and hours of media coverage of the actual tragedy begging to be replayed for the benefit of people who have forgotten how they felt five years ago, and it all becomes quite inevitable. Perhaps even necessary.

After all, 9/11 marked the last time we all felt the same thing.

And now it's done, except for the odd tremulous echo, and the occasional plaintive reflection on how briefly and beautifully united we all once were, back when we were angry and sad and scared, and holding hands in the light of terrible flames seemed the bravest thing that we could do.

See you again in 2011.

(Cross-posted.)

I'm Completely Bloody Sick of This

Hello, Shakers! I'm back, sort of... in a halfassed fashion. We still don't have internet service in our new building, so I'm sneaking in posts when I can. Man... I really miss having access at home... you don't realize how much you depend on it until you go without for a week or two!

That's not what I'm grousing about this morning, though. I'm grousing about this:

No shit.

I saw this headline on yahoo this morning, and my snorts were indeed derisive. Of course Bush is beating the 9/11 drum once again... as their popularity sinks deeper and deeper into the muck, the Bush Administration has nothing to lean on but the horror of that day. I'm not going to go on and on about this; everyone certainly seems to be aware of it, and I'm sure you've read plenty of blog posts over the last five years grousing about the same thing. I'm just so goddamed tired of the 9/11-Iraq links that are constantly being spun by the Bush Administration. It doesn't matter a bit that, in his address last night (and in other speeches recently), Bush is saying:

On September the 11th, we learned that America must confront threats before they reach our shores, whether those threats come from terrorist networks or terrorist states. I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

when he continues to, in the same speech, constantly mention Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the same sentences. It's a more subtle way of creating an association between all of them, without directly saying that Hussein was partially, if not completely responsible for the attacks. One direct sentence won't affect an entire speech of blurring. And, of course, Cheney is using the same tactics. Same shit, different day.

While Sen. John Rockefeller is saying the obvious; Iraq would be better off if we left it alone, the Right can offer no solutions, other than the usual "stay the course" dribble, and brazenly, send more troops.

As if the Bush Administration's lies haven't killed enough Americans already.

One more thing:

I realize this is never going to happen, but for the luvva pete, could the media find some other way to visualize 9/11 without showing the burning, collapsing towers? I realize some people are numb to those pictures at this point, but for others, the pain is still very real. One of my best friends is a 9/11 survivor; she ran down over a hundred flights of stairs and escaped before the building she was temping in collapsed. She still has nightmares, and the constant visuals shoved in her face every year just brings the pain back. Hell, I was a mile away from ground zero, and when I hear the recordings and see the pictures, all of the emotion comes flooding back. (Air America played a montage of 9/11 sound bytes while I was driving home yesterday; I was blubbering like an idiot by the time I got home.) It's been especially bad this year, since apparently, five years is the limit on exploiting a national tragedy, and there seems to be no end to the movies.

The concept of "too soon" appears to be lost on most people.

(Everything's coming up cross-posts...)

Caption This Photo

Via The Daily Background.

Actual Headline

Tune into C-SPAN later today for Harry Reid's long-awaited press conference on the sky being blue.

ABC Docudribble Flops

Trounced by football; ties with CBS’ re-run of the doc with all the nasty cursing. Think Progress has the numbers.

Based on what I'm seeing from bloggers who actually tried to watch the thing, like Chet Scoville and John Howard, it sounds just absolutely awful, irrespective of its inaccuracies, which makes me think the only people who possibly could have sat through the whole thing in all its dreadful wonder and claimed enjoyment were drinking copious amounts of Kool-Aid spiked with Bush Juice.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)

Alterman Fired

Eric Alterman, who has been writing the Altercation blog at MSNBC for a decade, has been fired.

Whether my termination is, in fact, a product of a political decision at GE/NBC, which according to reports I read and gossip I hear, has lately taken a much firmer hand in guiding the content of both MSNBC and MSNBC.com, I have no way of knowing. ...But speculation is not the same thing as evidence, and the good folks at MSNBC.com and GE/NBC can, I'm sure, give you good reasons why dumping Altercation is the right thing to do from a business standpoint -- though the natural speculation that arises is a damn good argument against the kind of media concentration that allows a company like GE to own NBC in the first place.

I'm quite interested, to say the least, to hear that explanation. If I'm being honest, I'm concerned that, if there's a progressive purge at MSNBC, liberal favorite Keith Olbermann would be next on their chopping block. I'd certainly like some kind of reassurance that he isn't going anywhere.

As for where Eric Alterman is going, you'll be able to find him at Media Matters, here.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)

Same shit, different day

In his national address last night, the BushBot 3000 sounded like a broken record of greatest hits on the war on terror. "Good evening. Five years ago, this date -- September the 11th -- was seared into America's memory. ... Today, we are safer, but we are not yet safe. ... On 9/11, our nation saw the face of evil. Yet on that awful day, we also witnessed something distinctly American: ordinary citizens rising to the occasion, and responding with extraordinary acts of courage. ... Since the horror of 9/11, we've learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy -- but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam -- a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent...." Et cetera et cetera et cetera. Without, as usual, any trace of irony.

Norbizness has generously summarized the address, with the caveat: "Hopefully this will be my last re-mix/shortening for a while, as they will discover that his continued lines of partisan bullshit five years play about as well as a Color Me Badd medley by Sepultura... or was it Pantera?... at the 1991 Monsters of Rock concert."

I'd like the share that hope, but I fear on the subject that the Bush administration might stop using partisan bullshit, I am utterly hopeless.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Mary Tyler Moore