Shakesville

What goes around, so on, so forth

In response to the ruthless, bullying, strong-arm tactics that came to symbolize GOP rule on Capitol Hill, John McCain once said:

We will not be in the majority forever. History has shown us that.

Maybe McCain was heartfelt in his Cassandra-esque warning, and maybe he wasn't. Either way, not enough of his fellow Republicans paid heed, and the consquences are positively Aesopian. The new Democratic-controlled Congress hasn't even opened for business, and already the GOP is whining for something it never, ever gave the Dems: fair play.

Republicans aren't yet an official minority in the House, but they're already beginning a campaign to portray themselves as victims of a heartless Democratic majority.
In a "Dear Colleague" letter circulated to fellow Republicans, three House GOPers are trying to push a "Minority Bill of Rights" -- based on a two-year-old proposal by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Say it with me now: Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

(This post dovetails quite nicely with this earlier entry by Shakes. Cross-posted.)

Fuck

Pam: "BREAKING NEWS: Lawmakers in Massachusetts, the only state where gay marriage is legal, just voted to advance a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a critical step toward putting the measure on the 2008 ballot. The Legislature approved the measure 132-61. The initiative, which only needed 50 votes to pass, must still be passed in the next legislative session before it will be put on the ballot in 2008. The full Massachusetts legislature will be meeting today for a Constitutional Convention to consider the proposed constitutional amendment. Only 50 votes in two consecutive sessions are needed to approve the measure for the 2008 ballot. [Governor-elect Deval Patrick], who takes office in two days, strongly opposes a vote on the civil rights of a minority."

I don't even know what kind of retrofuck jackhole piece-of-shit you've got to be to take away equal rights once they've been granted. I can't begin to imagine how one even considers such a heinous move, but then again I'm not a RAGING FUCKING ASSHOLE.

I also happen to agree that marriage is not a threat to marriage, and I have this terrible habit of actually believing that "all [people] are created equal" means something.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Is your local paper listening to soldiers?

It's rather likely that no matter how you-the-individual feel about the American occupation of Iraq or George Bush's leadership as a self-described "war president," you'd assume that most active-duty soldiers largely support the president and his Iraq policy. According to a recently-released poll of service members, however, you'd be dead wrong.

Guest-posting at the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report notes that a poll of 6,000 active-duty personnel conducted by the newspapers of the Military Times (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times) reaches conclusions that fly in the face of common conceptions on Iraq - conclusions that have so far gone largely unremarked in the press:

Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war; a majority believe it was wrong to go into Iraq in the first place; and a plurality reject the notion of sending additional troops into the war.
For reasons that are unclear, the media seems to have missed the poll entirely. [...]

In terms of newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times were the only U.S. papers to run stories of their own. Reuters and UPI mentioned the poll in wire stories, which were not widely picked up. That's it. That's all the print coverage the poll received.

A quick check of my own home daily - the doggedly-centrist St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a property of Lee Enterprises of Iowa - finds no mention whatsoever of the Military Times poll. Perhaps it's not surprising for an increasingly local-emphasis paper like the P-D, but given that the paper relies heavily on the wire services for rumors of war, the omission of news of such a large-scale military poll seems conspicuous.

After all, as Benen says, the story "sounds kind of newsworthy."

Well. Perhaps your local paper has done a better job of listening to soldiers. Or perhaps not.

(Cross-posted at AlterNet and back home.)

Unholy

This video of Drag Rudy making out with The Donald is a double toss-up:

1. It's a toss-up between whether it's more offensive to trannies or women.

2. It'll make you toss up your lunch.

Consider yourself duly warned.

Unclear on the Concept

Happy New Year, Shakers! I hope you all had an enjoyable Holiday season... nice how we won't have to hear about the "War on Christmas" for, oh, two or three months now.

I spent much of the holiday trying to avoid "news" and keep my ulcer from getting any worse. Of course, when I return, I see The Usual Gang of Idiots* are still up to their old tricks. Virgil Goode, for example, is still in hand-wringing hysterics over those evil, evil Muslims. After being justifiably spanked for his ridiculous bigoted comments regarding Keith Ellison, he decides to go one step further and "explain himself" in an amazingly stupid USAToday op-ed. Save Judeo-Christian values, illegal immigrants will bring about our doom... the usual bullshit. Here's my favorite bit (bolds mine):

Let us remember that we were not attacked by a nation on 9/11; we were attacked by extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion. I believe that if we do not stop illegal immigration totally, reduce legal immigration and end diversity visas, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.

So, let's see...

Accusing "extremists" of wanting to "mold the United States into the image of their religion" while demanding adherence to Judeo-Christian principles without a trace of irony... check.
Demanding control over immigration while touting "freedom" without a trace of irony... check.
Expecting "freedom-loving persons" around the world to see us as a "beacon of freedom" while simultaneously closing off the rest of the world without a trace of irony... check.

Wow, I think he hit the trifecta! I love how he's still beating that diversity visa "we only want Europeans" point to death, too.

To their credit, USAToday issued a response to this idiocy:

Keith Ellison's election to the House, as the chamber's first Muslim, provides the United States with a grand opportunity to showcase its credentials as a nation of opportunity, equality and diversity.

What a great story to tell the Muslim world. Five years after 9/11, voters in America's heartland elected Ellison, an African-American who grew up in Detroit and converted to Islam in college, to one of the nation's highest offices. The 43-year-old Democrat took 56% of the vote in his Minneapolis-area district.

Ellison upped the chance to polish America's image for religious tolerance, as well, when he said he'd use Islam's holy book, the Quran, at his ceremonial swearing-in this week.

That's when the chance to shine was tarnished by a few ugly voices. The loudest belongs to Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., who used the occasion to take a crude swipe not only at Ellison and the Quran, but at all Muslims.

[...]

Other critics of Ellison's desire to carry the Quran, a holy book meaningful to him, ranted that the Bible and only the Bible is the basis of America's values.
They couldn't be more wrong about the essence of the nation's values. Nor could Goode about what the nation has to fear.
They're even wrong on their facts.
As Goode, who is starting his sixth term, surely knows, House members are officially sworn in without any religious book. They simply raise their hands in a mass ceremony in the chamber. In unofficial ceremonies later, they re-enact the oath, often with a Bible, for commemorative photos.
Some Jewish members and others have chosen holy books other than the Bible. Even presidents have strayed from using the Bible when taking the oath of office.
In 1825, John Quincy Adams reportedly used a law volume. News accounts say Theodore Roosevelt used no Bible in taking his first oath of office, in 1901. It's Ellison's constitutional right to choose a book that's meaningful to him.
Tolerance and religious freedom are at America's heart. So is the nation's embrace of people from all countries and cultures.
Several million Muslims live in the USA. It is to the nation's credit that one of them will join Congress this week. And if Goode is worried about Muslim immigrants, he's about 260 years too late in Ellison's case. Ellison traces his ancestors to Louisiana in 1742.
Goode and other critics could learn something from the man whose actions they've vilified.

2007 is looking pretty damn good already.

(I, by the way, rang in the New Year by dancing the night away at Chicago's Dank Haus ballroom to the crazed musical stylings of The Polkaholics. These madmen performed a 15 minute version of The Chicken Dance ; my legs are still sore. 2007 is looking great.)

*With apologies to Mad Magazine

CNN Suxxx

It occurs to me that if CNN hadn't been going for what appears to be a play on the children's series "Where's Waldo?" perhaps they would have avoided this whole thing by formally referring to the terrorist by his last name, which is the habit of most professional journamalisters. But instead they went for the kooky gag in covering the quite serious story about America's Most Wanted. Seems to be a theme.

It also reminds me of something else about which I've been meaning to complain, which is CNN.com's addition of "Story Highlights" at the top of each story—a box with three bullet points (give or take one) that summarizes the story. Here's how President Ford's funeral coverage has been highlighted:

Not only does it irritate me that CNN is making "not reading the news" easier on people, and confound me from a marketing standpoint as "news" is, quite literally, their middle name, but the way in which they're doing it has the capacity to offend even the most basic intellectual competency. The summaries themselves are presented as though to suggest: "Here's the news for the slack-jawed moron on the go!" Even the entertainment stories get the highlighting treatment:

You've got to be kidding me.
Seriously, if you need bullet points to get you through a story on Julia Roberts being pregnant again, maybe reading an entire news story now and again isn't the worst thing you could do for yourself.

The thing that's most amusing about the "Story Highlights" to me is that one of the oft-grumbled complaints of the MSM about the blogosphere is that we pajama-clad stinkpits do nothing of any intrinsic value—all we do is boil down news stories and tack on the worthless opinion of a non-expert poopyhead boo hoo hoo moany whinge and pout. So I guess the new idea, since discrediting us isn't working, is to do us one better and just bullet point stories into nothingness, proving once again they have no idea what function blogs actually serve.

"Where's Obama?" Update

After CNN aired a graphic with a picture of Osama bin Laden overlaid with the words "Where's Obama?" Wolf Blitzer issued an apology this morning.

"I just want to make a correction, an apology, Soledad, for what we did yesterday. In 'The Situation Room,' we had a bad graphic," Blitzer said in a transcript delivered to RAW STORY by CNN's public relations staff. "We were doing a piece on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in this new year 2007. Unfortunately, instead of saying "where is Osama," it said "where is Obama." I'm going to be calling Senator Barack Obama to make a personal apology."

A CNN employee also told RAW STORY an additional apology was offered by Soledad O'Brien earlier in the morning.

Good grief. Meanwhile, Senator Obama's office says they don't suspect any malicious intent. "Someone made a mistake in a graphic, and that's as far as it goes," said Senator Obama's Press Secretary Tommy Vietor, and thanked alert bloggers for calling it out. Kudos to Obama and his office for being so publicly graceful and generous about it. I can't imagine the unbelievable shitstorm that would have resulted if this had happened to a member of the GOP—and I hope that's precisely what's going on behind the scenes, while Obama stays above the fray.

My only question is: How fucking stupid are the assholes at CNN? (Don't answer; it's rhetorical.) No one noticed the mistake in the graphic before it went to air? Blitzer didn't notice on air? What a barrel of idiot monkeys that joint has become. Sheesh.

Quote of the Day

I know it's early, but I don't think anything's going to beat this one…

"America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s history." — President Bush, referring to former President Gerald Ford, without a trace of self-awareness or irony, as usual.

In a close runner-up reported by Atrios, Chris Matthews, as part of his running commentary during coverage of Ford's funeral, apparently referred to the Capitol with its "glittering dome" as "the helmet of the country." Mmm…phallicky.

Only on CNN

What—no sneers? No jeers? No Smear the Queer? I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Saddam I Am.

It is too much to ask that the execution of a deposed dictator in whose country we're still at war not be headlined as if by Dr. Seuss? Are there any grown-ups left in the media?

Holiday loot

For some reason - dark and Calvinistic, I'm sure - I never feel that the new year really gets underway until the first official workday. So, by that token and with all sincerity, Happy friggin' New Year.

Sooo...whajaget? Talking holiday largess here.

We're middle-aged folks here at Rancho Waveflux, well past the innocent childhood avarice of the gifting season, and yet it's still fun on some level to talk what Santa brought as long as you don't spend all day doing it. Best perhaps to limit such discussion to one item received - a favorite item - and one given.

So here's what I gave to my beloved wife:

Yeah, that's it up on the wall. I am rather proud of having given this tea light holder thingie (from Pier 1) because it makes a kind of evolution in the things I have purchased for M. Earlier gifts have usually been personal items that I felt she'd enjoy. A pearl pendant. A silver ring with inscribed with images of running kitties. A terry cloth robe with a cat applique pattern just like one worn by Phoebe on an episode of Friends (an item previously known as the Best. Gift. Ever.). But this marked the first time, I think, that I gave M something that was not "merely" personal, something that spoke more to our shared life, our house, our home. She liked it. Good thing too, because I felt considerably outside my set of competencies while shopping for such an item.

And here's what M gave me:

It's an iPod music thingie! Specifically, it's an inMotion iM9 speaker system designed to take the solipsism out of the average iPod experience. Fairly rugged and very portable, it's served me well in the rather specific use I have for music: motivation as I go through the workout down in the gym - cum - laundry room - slash - workshop - aka - basement. Headphones are fine while riding the stationary bike, but are somewhat unwieldy while lifting heavy stuff; now I'm free of them. Excellent.

(The song playing in the photo is "Bim Bam Smash" from the soundtrack of The Bourne Supremacy. It's from the car chase scene, and it is an excellent accompaniment to spinning.)

Feel free to list notable presents from your own holidays, whether given or received.

(Cross-posts are the gift that keep on giving...)

File Under: Doesn't Bode Well

It's clearly laid out in 140 pages of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets: The top-secret plan for Rudy Giuliani's bid for the White House.

The remarkably detailed dossier sets out the budgets, schedules and fund-raising plans that will underpin the former New York mayor's presidential campaign — as well as his aides' worries that personal and political baggage could scuttle his run.

Graphically depicted by photographs of Rudy in drag.

The loss of the battle plan is a remarkable breach in the high-stakes game of presidential politics and a potentially disastrous blunder for Giuliani in the early stages of his campaign.

Ouch. Heh heh. I wish—but the calamity of this bungle is likely a wee bit overstated, no matter how much Rudy's opponents, or haters, would love to see it bring a swift and inglorious end to his campaign before it really began. Nonetheless, this shit sounds hilarious.

One page cites the explicit concern that he might "drop out of [the] race" as a consequence of his potentially "insurmountable" personal and political vulnerabilities.

On the same page is a list of the candidate's central problems in bullet-point form: his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; "social issues," on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.

I love how it's not "Rudy treating wives like shit, being adulterous fiend" that's the problem, but the wives themselves.

"All will come out — in worst light," the memo continues. "$100 million against us on this stuff."

I almost can't think of a better way to spend $100 million of Republicans' money. Almost.

Ask, Tell—Don't let us stop you!

Call me a cynical old cow (I know you will!), but I'm just not getting a huge thrill out of former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired army general John M. Shalikashvili throwing his support behind repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell at the same time an escalation in Iraq is being contemplated. In fact, I'm so super-cynical about this one that I'll go so far as to say that there are undoubtedly certain folks who have one eye on simply increasing recruitment and another eye on removing one big honking potential draft dodge. I know it's an insulated group in D.C. these days, but even they can't be unaware that among the sorts of young men who aren't particularly interesting in fighting their war, identifying as gay isn't catastrophically controversial. There might have been a time when most straight American men would rather have died than said they were gay, but times they are a-changing…

Shalikashvili says that conversations with gay servicemembers have convinced him "just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers… I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."

Uh huh. Well, it's good to see that we're all starting to come around in our hour of need.

Welcome to 2007

Payback's a Bitch

Somebody got a spine for Christmas!

As they prepare to take control of Congress this week and face up to campaign pledges to restore bipartisanship and openness, Democrats are planning to largely sideline Republicans from the first burst of lawmaking.

House Democrats intend to pass a raft of popular measures as part of their well-publicized plan for the first 100 hours. They include tightening ethics rules for lawmakers, raising the minimum wage, allowing more research on stem cells and cutting interest rates on student loans.

But instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early victories.

Nancy Pelosi, the Californian who will become House speaker, and Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who will become majority leader, finalized the strategy over the holiday recess in a flurry of conference calls and meetings with other party leaders. A few Democrats, worried that the party would be criticized for reneging on an important pledge, argued unsuccessfully that they should grant the Republicans greater latitude when the Congress convenes on Thursday.

Ugh. Whiny babies with a loser mentality. And crappy media with intractable GOP-positive framing. The Democrats are now the majority. They've got bills ready to go that they've had ready for years which the GOP has been blocking for years. The Democrats are totally right not to bother wasting time during their "first 100 hours" perfunctorily entertaining the GOP's crap alternative proposals to legislation of which the Dems' 30+ seat majority guarantees passage anyway—legislation, by the way, which the GOP has ignored for years, unless it was the block Democratic proposals. Fuck the GOP. They had their chance.

I don't endorse the Democrats running Congress this way ad infinitum, but to use their "first 100 hours" to pass precisely the legislation they were elected to pass without mollycoddling the suddenly pro-bipartisanship GOP? Yeah, I've got absolutely not the slightest fucking objection to that shit. Who gives a rat's patoot about some bullshit GOP alternatives to basic legislation like raising the fucking minimum wage? Not I.

We've all got a pretty good idea about where the GOP stands on this stuff already. That's why the Dems now have the majority—and they shouldn't be afraid to use it.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Married With Children

Happy New Year

And welcome to the year 2007. On the downside: still no flying cars or talking robot servants. On the upside: no robot servants attempting to turn the tables and enslave their human overlords.

At any rate, we at Shakes' Manor wish you all a happy New Year's Day.

Happy New Year's Eve

I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate New Year's Eve than with a mad and wonderful rendition of Auld Lang Syne, a traditional Scottish song, performed by a German band. I mean, it sort of makes perfect nonsense for Shakesville.

Happy New Year's Eve, Shakers!

An eclipse in the season of light

Last night found M and I at the house of a friend, a minister, along with another couple who were long-time friends of the hostess. It was a warm and congenial evening in a comfortable room with a wood fire, a brightly decorated Christmas tree, a sleepy cat, good company.

At one point, the husband in the other couple paused to answer his cell phone. He listened for a bit, then spoke briefly before hanging up. He looked up at us.

"They hung Saddam," he said.

We were silent for a moment, but only for a moment. We remarked on how the timing of the execution was at once both a surprise and completely expected; we agreed that Saddam's death would change nothing substantially in Iraq and would likely provoke a short-term spike in violence; we argued over the degree of culpability that individual American citizens, folks like ourselves, might feel regarding the execution in particular or the Iraq debacle in general. It was the kind of conversation that was doubtless repeated million of times elsewhere, and so was not terribly unique in that respect. I don't think any minds among us were changed last night regarding America in Iraq, and that probably was likely reflected elsewhere as well and so is not very remarkable.

The discontinuity between the news of Saddam's hanging and the warmth and humanity of the holidays - the season of light, as they say - did strike me then, however, and resonates with me now as a perfect exemplar of what George Bush has done of his own choice and for his ends but in your name and in mine.

It seems to me that if the president had tried consciously and with all his effort to get it precisely wrong in Iraq, in both essence and in form, he could not do better (or is it worse?) than he has done to this point.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

(Cross-posted.)

It makes you use your brain

Really, it does. Or so say its creators, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. What is "it"? It is a new game called "Intelligent Design Versus Evolution". You see, it really, really makes you use your brain as evidenced by this statement from Cameron:

"We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of evolution is perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times."

Or maybe not.

I like the way he says it presents "both side of the argument" and calls evolution "the greatest hoax of modern times" in the same sentence. I think we've found the guy who came up with "fair and balanced" for FOX.

For more on brain usage (*cough* or lack thereof *cough*), let's hear from the other creator of the game:

"Intelligent Design Versus Evolution' is unique in that the playing pieces are small rubber brains. We used the brains because we want players to use their brains. The incentive is to play for 'brain' cards, and the team or individual with the most brains wins. There are brains all over the game, because we want to make people think deeply about what they believe.

"This is because the average person doesn't know that the evolutionist lives by a blind faith in an unscientific theory (a theory that one scientist called a 'fairy-tale for grown-ups'). Through the game we show the irrational nature of evolution, using their own beliefs and quotes. This explains why evolutionists have a special language, something we call 'the language of speculation,' where they use words like 'We believe, perhaps, probably, maybe, could have …"

[...]

If, in fact, evolution would be the truth, there would have to be evidences of some sort of those transitions, such as a sheepdog, pupling, or bullfrog.[pictured above, as it is in the game--Misty]

Anyway, did you see where this guy--an author who wrote books called: How to Bring Your Children to Christ, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution – Letters to an atheist, Nostradamus: Attack on America--calls evolution an unscientific theory? WTF? Yeah, this guy is really using his brain all right.

But, hey, you even get a bonus video with the game! Check this shit out:

The game also comes with a free award-winning DVD called "The Science of Evolution," in which Comfort and Cameron take an orangutan to lunch and discuss the theory of evolution.

I bet that orangutan was bored to tears by the lack of intelligent conversation.

Saddam is Dead

Al Hurra reports that Saddam has been executed.

UPDATE: Posting at The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen points to Josh Marshall's analysis, which Steve calls "the most accurate and poignant I've seen," and I totally agree:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

...This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

And I'm not even sure that this is "getting it right." Leaving aside any debate about the ethics of capital punishment for a moment, I'm not remotely convinced that turning Hussein into a martyr to satiate our need for vengeance is the wisest strategic decision in the long run. In my estimation, there was every reason to lock him up and throw away the key, and, beyond that, little about which to be certain. And death is well fucking certain.