fr_defenestrato: (Cheney)
I've long quoted and linked to the Rude Pundit's columns and cheered his dissing of the fuckheads at the top of the Federal Government, which of course were Republican fuckheads for eight years under, to my way of thinking, the most appalling criminal ever to run this country, Dick Cheney. Oh, and his sock puppet, the president, what was his name.

So I've been waiting for the Rude One to start picking on Pres. Obama and his administration in the same sort of fashion... or, well, at all... and as of today I finally have evidence of 'at all'. This seems to me a singularly cogent and disinterested view of Obama's young presidency: 'While people trust Obama in an almost surreal way, the President's got to offer a controlling concept to his plans. If he has one beyond, "Holy fuck, we gotta do something," he has yet to articulate it.'

I wonder how long it's going to take the average liberal(ish) citizen to stop being distracted by bells and whistles (like ending torture and jump-starting stem cell research—not that this isn't good stuff in and of itself) and notice that Obama's dealings with the wealth-and-power elite of the country look very much like the status quo. Ok, fine, he made a mean face at the domestic auto industry and smacked a few peepees; but when Europe patently rejects the machinations of the American Great Black Hope because he refuses to tighten oversight of the financial industries whose carnivorous practices created the current global financial crisis... um... is it too early to say 'I told you so'?

Also, something about his 'Oh, we're going to get along just fine!' response to said rejection made me think explicitly of Bush's frequent recourse to utter make-believe.
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
The fact that Governor Palin has decided to reject 31% of the federal government stimulus money budgeted for Alaska must be giving the vapors to other Republican idiot governors who are craving that national attention like a hungry baby at a South Carolina Hooters. It's like Palin just saw and raised Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford, except they're not just playing with cash. They're tossing their citizens' asses into the pot...

Oh, but Palin's toeing that anti-government line. "We are not requesting funds intended to just grow government," Palin said. "In essence we say no to operating funds for more positions in government." That's right - for Sarah Palin, hiring more math teachers for poor school districts in Anchorage, where the dropout rate is twice the national average, is merely just letting government grow out of control.
The Rude Pundit

Emphasis mine.
fr_defenestrato: (bush)
1. I have a really tough time even wrapping my head around the idea that a member of my species could kill their child and nickname it "gloopity-glop."

2. It is more and more clear that federal taxes in the United States are principally if not entirely a wealth redistribution scheme that flows from poor to rich. What's worse, they've figured out how to get a significant minority of the folks with the most to lose (in terms of percent of their wealth) to agree heartily with said taxation in order to fund "whatever globally crucial wars we're touting at the moment." To squawk about the obscene amounts of funding the feds are pouring into Iraq and elsewhere—directly, that is, into the coffers of a precious few already obscenely wealthy men who provide the products and services and accoutrements of war—is to be unpatriotic and for the terrorists to have already won.

Watch: what we have been seeing for 6 months will continue indefinitely: some Congresspeoples will holler and froth publicly about curtailing the war, reports from various quarters will take various stances, but the end message will always be the same: what we're doing now is kinda sorta working but it'll take months or years to really figure it all out. Just give us more time. That's because we're not looking for progress. What we're doing has precious little to do with international politics or ideology or national security or Middle Eastern stability, and it CERTAINLY has nothing whatsoever do to with the threat of Islamic terrorism to the Amurrkin way of life. It has everything to do with ensuring that the people who run the military-industrial complex can keep their fireplaces burning all winter with fresh cash, or perhaps the donated gloopity-glop of their lowest-paid workers.

Like Louis XIV, a slew of third-world despots, and a few choice Roman emperors, by far the most successful war being waged by the Organized Crime Racket of the American Presidency (OCRAP) is the war on the peasantry.

3. Shoes.

fr_defenestrato: (armaments)
All kidding and all politics aside, the most compelling argument for the removal of U.S. military troops from Iraq—indeed, for the permanent disbanding of the U.S. military as a whole—and frankly they can all stay in fucking Iraq for all I care—is the staggering, in-your-face, nine-inch-nails-on-a-chalkboard stupidity that prevails there. Sure the front lines end up populated mostly by kids most unfit for any sort of formal education (typically performing badly in class from grade school up); but what is less commonly known is that at every level of military command and administration the important once are chosen not for their smarts but for the facility with which they can make shit up on the fly to pretend they're smart. That's why the knee-deep bullshit jargon. That's why "to include:" is used even in past tense. That's why every document in the "List of Applicable Documents" in the Request for Information I'm reading right now has the annotation "(current version or later)" next to it.

Support our troops! They need our support! They're too stupid to get out of the way of a suicide bomber!

(The author of this blog would like to point out to anyone who should happen across this entry who has a relative or friend fighting in Iraq, that he really doesn't wish them ill. After all, they are only following the Fourth Reich's orders and fighting for my right to marry, have joint power of attorney with my partner, visit him in hospital, successfully bequeath my property to him, etc.; to not get beaten up, fired, kicked out of my housing, or kept from joining whatever association for being queer; also for my right to be religion-free; for my overall right to privacy without illegal molestation from the feral gubmt; and to ensure all the country's kids are taught according to indisputable scientific facts and principles.)














































(Oh. Wait.)
fr_defenestrato: (Default)
"Apparently, if George W. Bush can't go to see Little Leaguers play tee-ball on the South Lawn of the White House whenever the hell he wants, then the terrorists have already won."
fr_defenestrato: (skull)
Does anybody else involuntarily shudder every time they see a photo of Michael Chertoff?
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
It may become fashionable, years and decades hence, to blame Francis Ford Coppola for popularizing the crime family drama (never mind that The Godfather and sequels have distant roots in all kinds of noir flicks and criminal character studies... think Jimmy Cagney and his ma in White Heat). But the apotheosis of pomo mob stories is surely The Sopranos, which is fixin' to spurt its last real soon. And good riddance, because besides providing idle, cable-ready, rich Americans with Quality Crime Drama for eight years, it has also beaten, trod, and machete'd a path through the jungles of the American consciousness such that people today expect mob behavior at every turn and are trained to feel pathos for those exhibiting it, despite the fact that the latter are self-serving thieves and homicidal sociopaths.

Witness, for a modest example, the Organized Crime Racket of the American Presidency (OCRAP). Aye, Lewis "Scooter" Libby shall scoot off to the pen for 30 months (assuming his people can't figure a way to buy the appeals court decision or a pardon from the Head Fuckstick hisself). That's as it should be, though I personally can't conceive of two and a half years' imprisonment for Cheney's perjurious former Chief of Staff being decried as a harsh sentence, as opposed to the "leniency" that was requested (da fuck did they want, a stern talking to?). True, Libby is certainly not the person primarily responsible for the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press. But he was part of the sick, disgusting, lying, corrupt, vindictive, outright evil organization that is OCRAP, which sought to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his criticism of OCRAP's Iraq war policy by calling a general, protracted international hit out on his spy wife.

From AP: "Mr. Libby was the poster child for all that has gone wrong in this terrible war," said defense attorney Theodore Wells. "He has fallen from public grace. It is a tragic fall, a tragic fall." No, Mr. Wells, Mr. Libby is the poster child for an administration with no governing moral code, an administration that thinks that, because it has the reins of the crime racket and the capos and soldiers and general muscle to back it up, it can behave in any way it damn well pleases. That has been Mr. Bush's attitude since taking office, shrugging off world (and domestic) opinion on virtually every issue whenever it suited him or enriched his corporate cronies in the racket. It was the attitude that allowed the Vice President, or Karl Rove, aka Satan Himself, to order the hit on Plame without any consideration for honor, justice, or human life.

And now Bush and his crowd are crying to the press that Libby's sentence is a tragedy for his family. See? This is absolutely organized crime behavior: Admit nothing, not even when they've caught you with the smoking pistol or with the crack pipe in your mouth or, as [livejournal.com profile] rudepundit might say, with your dick in some Iraqi child's eye socket. Libby goes to gaol and does his time quietly, never having implicated his masters in their crimes, and will be rewarded grandly upon his exit. Just wait. Meanwhile, the guiltier assholes don't even have to pretend to honor the public trust that Libby broke or shame or even censure him for said breaking. Just: Poor Libby's family. Sigh.

In short: This OCRAP Administration is absolutely amoral, absolutely evil, absolutely illegal, and needs to be taken down or taken over NOW.
fr_defenestrato: (milos)
Ganked from Vidio[sic]View.com. In case you don't know, U.S.C. 2257 is a bit of federal law regarding (a) what counts as porn and (b) what responsibilities the producers of porn must bear in record-keeping, to ensure, for example, that porn gets driven wholly out of business so America can be pure and Puritan once again nobody's making child porn. The law was revamped by the Republican-controlled Congress about 3 years ago, inserting a positively obsessive-compulsive set of regs and guidelines for that record-keeping. For example, every single photograph image you have displayed on a Website must be catalogued by name and location and show reference to the model(')s(') proof of age at the time of photography. Similarly for live action porn. The law limits itself to concern about "actual people engaged in actual sex" but you know that the federal fucking government will construe that, if they want to bust somebody, as "Eating a peanut butter sandwich while having a look in one's eye that suggests thinking about somebody, somewhere, having sex." Anyway:

'The whole 2257 thing has just taken a new turn, and it's not a good one for companies with older titles. In a story on XBiz.com, the FBI visited the home of J.T., owner of JT Video, to conduct a 2257 record-keepings inspection for two gay films produced in 1997. It would seem that a film made at that time would not be subject to inspection, as films older than seven years did not apply. However, a press rep for the FBI confirmed that material that has been re-issued on DVD, for example, would restart the time-limit clock, putting formerly exempt material at risk. So it seems that any repackaging of older titles needs the 2257 record-keeping, which would seem to put a lot of companies into a state of shock. Titles from such outfits as Laguna, the old Fox Studio, Catalina, In Hand—the list goes on—could be violating 2257 by releasing the titles without documentation that they most likely no longer have. It's being said that possibly two-thirds of the titles produced before 2000 is now going to be "illegal" to be sold. Chris Ward at Raging Stallion told me, "I don't think anyone is going to jail, and I don't think it will really change anything, but officially, it's the law, and there is a risk involved." Raging Stallion says they do not have any older titles that would apply. Fred Bercovitz is the guy at Video 10, whose company releases predominately older titles that are now being released on DVD. Fred told me, "We have no records on file for (the older titles) so these would all have to be taken off the market, I suppose, if we were told to. It seems like they're changing the interpretation of the law every other week. Hopefully it will be reversed," adding, "It's very clearly draconian, and I rarely get to use that word!" The 2257 is still being challenged, but courts have rejected injunctions, saying the law must apply until the challenges are resolved. I can hear the "Aaaaagh!s" being shrieked throughout the industry. There will be developments, I'm sure.'

I think that "2/3rd of titles older than 2000" is a conservative estimate. Why would anyone in the porn biz keep records as bizarrely elaborate as the law MIGHT insist 5, 10 years from now? How in the blistering FUCK can any legal expert argue that laws drafted one year can apply to entertainment product created a decade ago? I can only hope that the no-longer-GOP Congress is not quite so much the religious right's under-the-shit-table bitch as to put up with this nonsense... But that's not terribly likely, given the wholly craven, principle-free, bootlicking, pandering puscillanimity of the current crop of Democratic "leaders"; plus we've still got a Justice department, handpicked by the head Fuckstick of the Organized Crime Racket of the American Presidency (OCRAP), that would have found ostracism way too lenient a punishment for Hester Prynne, that would have sent her to an offshore prison camp (say, on the Vineyard) and tortured her (a) for the identity of Pearl's father and (b) just because they're the Justice Department, and they get to.
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
The Organized Crime Racket of the American Presidency (OCRAP) continues to upmarket its image, following up our maverick, principled (and oh, so timely) stance about Darfur with more genuine, loving care to export to Africa.

The front page photo of the Washington Post Express has OCRAP Head Fuckstick Bush picking up a young black child as he might a pile of dirty underpants or a rotten log, and the caption reads "Bush Seeks $30B for AIDS." (I recommend he look under the sofa cushions; he is as likely to find it there as anywhere else.) Inside, the article takes Fuckstick at his word, going so far as to state, as fact, that the $30 billion represents a "doubling" of current funding.

What the blistering fuck IS this? Where did my liberal media go? (Maybe they're buried in the sofa too; that's what I used to do as a young child when things got uglier than I could deal with.)

There IS no $15 billion to double to $30. The Fuckstick used the number $15 billion once, four years ago, in his "State of the, [his] State of the Union, or State, [his] speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation" in announcing his Presidential Emergency Program For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and it was immediately and abundantly clear that the number was entirely fallacious, as solid as a calamari fart and every bit as pernicious. Four budget years later (in which, BTW, the White House's recommended PEPFAR numbers were used) the U.S. has spent less than $9.5 billion, leaving the White House scrambling to get Congress to spend $5.5 billion in a single year. How can our major newspapers allow the criminally lying assholes to get away with this shit on a daily basis? What fucking planet is this?

Ah well. Who cares? Certainly not Fuckstick; he doesn't give a flying fuck who comes up with how much money to combat HIV and AIDS anywhere: not here, not in Africa, not anywhere. He didn't care in 2003 when he dialed up the magic number $15 billion. If he cared in the slightest, he wouldn't try to foist abstinence-only prevention programs on at-risk populations here in the U.S., let alone in Africa, where societal norms around sex and marriage are radically different. Oh wait! I guess it's NOT abstinence-only... Fuckstick's AIDS Mouthpiece Marc Dybul explains:

'Calling ABC programs abstinence-only is also a mischaracterization. There is no abstinence-only provision. I wish people would stop calling it that. It's abstinence until marriage.'

Ah, I see. So not only do we want to tell people how and when to have sex, but we want to dictate how and when people can form primary lifetime 2-person bonds—presumably as blessed in the eyes of an imaginary being that few of the abstaining-until-marriage folk actually believe in.

And then this from Dybul: 'The bottom line is that funding should go to programs that work, and the evidence (supporting) ABC is overwhelming.'

And here I come close to gnawing off my own fingers. There is NO WORD for this kind of horseshit except EVIL. There just isn't. Study after study has found these programs to be wildly ineffective. See, for example, the congressionally mandated study whose results were released last month; also in 2004 Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) requested a review of federally funded abstinence-only programs aimed at public school students, which found that 11 or 13 of the reviewed curricula contained scientific inaccuracies w/r/t condom efficacy, risk factors, etc. And common sense suggests that, if you tell hormonally wound-up youngsters that their only option is to refrain from sex and don't tell them about STD prevention, a lot of them are going to have sex anyway without appropriate protection.

To argue that these programs are "successful" basically takes the same kind of disregard and disdain for the scientific method that allows Fuckstickians in Kansas and elsewhere to argue that evolution doesn't exist, Yahweh put all those dinosaur bones in the earth's crust just to test our faith, and global warming is a Democratic Party plot to scare citizens away from the GOP.

Nightmare... must... end... Please, gourd, wake up!
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
From the perfectly named Dick Cheney's remarks to U.S. Troops at Contingency Operating Base Speicher, Iraq:

"We are here, above all, because the terrorists who have declared war on America and other free nations have made Iraq the central front in that war."

Oh, they HAVE, have they? That's funny, I coulda sweared WE had decided to take our war on terror to one of the few friggin' places in the Middle East that WASN'T overrun with jihadists.

"[Osama et al.] see this country as the center of a new caliphate, from which they can stir extremism and violence throughout the region..."
spleen cont. )

Dear Iraq:

May. 10th, 2007 12:53 pm
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)

We keep sending him.  You keep missing him.
What up with that?
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is." —George W. Bush*

"I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn." —George W. Bush**

And this lovely exchange from 20070111:
CONDI: ...we're not going to stay married to a plan that isn't working because Iraqis aren't living up to their end of the bargain.

SEN OBAMA: Madam Secretary...Are you telling me that, if in six months or whatever timeframe you are suggesting that in fact the Maliki government has not performed these benchmarks... that at that point you are going to suggest to the Maliki government that we are going to start phasing down our troop levels in Iraq?

CONDI: Senator, I want to be not explicit abvout what we might do, because I don't want to speculate. But I will tell you this: the benchmarks that I'm looking at—the oil law's important, the political process is extraordinarily important—but the most important thing that the Iraqi government has to do right now is to reestablish the confidence of its population that it's going to be evenhanded in defending it. That's what we need to see over the next two or three months, or this plan is not going to work.

SEN OBAMA: The question is not whether the plan is going to work; the question is what the consequences to the Iraqi government... Are there any circumstances that the President or you are willing to share in which we would say to the Iraqis, 'We are no longer maintaining ... American combat troops in Iraq'? Are there any circumstances that you can articulate in which we would say to the Maliki government that enough is enough and we are no longer committing our troops?

CONDI: I'm not going to speculate... but the President made very clear that of course there are circumstances. That's what it means when he says 'Our patience is not limited.'

GOURD: Freudian slip?

----
*, **criticizing President Clinton on *19990409 **19990605 for not setting a timetable for exiting Kosovo.
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
(so I got a form mail from Don Cheadle and John Prendergast at darfur@mail.democracyinaction.org asking me to sign a petition to Prez. Bush urging him toward action on Darfur... on the site to which I was redirected I was asked to edit the text of the form letter before sending it off to the White House. I did:)

Dear Mr. President,

Sudanese President al-Bashir continues to ignore diplomatic efforts to pressure him to end the genocide in Darfur. More than 400,000 Darfurians have already lost their lives and over 2.5 million have been displaced.

In case you were asleep, drunk, coked out, or have received contraindicative reports directly from "reliable British sources" or maybe God, that's on par with what we helped Saddam Hussein do to the Kurds of Iraq (and perhaps also on par with what we did and continue to do to the Iraqi people).
More bile )
fr_defenestrato: (Default)
the evil fucker. i mean, pure, unadulterated, no two ways about it EVIL MOTHERFUCKER.

i dunno where the fuck Dana Perino came from, but i truly madly deeply wish there was something to the christian cosmology, because i really wish to believe that someday she and every single evil motherfucking boss of hers will be holding a coffee clatch in hell. if that's not possible i suggest we give them a one-way ticket to the sun, departing Earth 1300 hrs EST 20 January 2009.

this evil motherfucking president (TEMP) vetoes and will continue to veto any bill that includes ANY kind of structure to facilitate the end of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. TEMP even steadfastly refuses to put any due dates on "benchmarks" for the "democratic," "independent" government of Iraq. why? Perino tells us that "[TEMP] is determined to win in Iraq." what does winning look like to TEMP? he won't tell us. maybe we can use common sense and surmise that winning is when all the Shiites and John Sununus stop killing each other. wait wait wait: our ultimate goal is a cessation to violence, but we won't put a timeframe on cessation of violence?

but if TEMP is using that criterion, which he appears to be doing, he is committing us to an indefinite stay there (until he's no longer TEMP and somebody else is T(hopefully slightly less)EMP and won't veto a bill with a troop withdrawal timetable.

but whoa, two steps back. why is ANYBODY giving credence to the absurd notion that TEMP refuses to even entertain the notion of ending this U.S. occupation because he wants to win? please. he is keeping us engaged, at the cost of a few American lives and a few hundred Iraqi lives per week because and ONLY because it benefits his cronies in the big business of waging war and thereby lines his pockets, makes his retirement (the pre-hell phase, anyway) more cushy, and gets more and more evil corporate motherfuckers to love him even more. how motherfucking sick depraved eat the asshole out of a dead wolf EVIL can he get?
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
There is no calculus to empathy for victims of homicide. Who knows why persons X and Y react the way they do? Who has the temerity to judge or rate those reactions? When 9/11 occurred I was taken by surprise both by my own tears (in the Metro, of all places) and by the reportage from my friend Chick that his wife Ellen had spent DAYS in tears, basically non-functional. That said, this time around I empathize with the terror of the situation in VTech but not exactly the carnage, the loss. For whatever reason, I am not upset or depressed. Some crazy fuck shot a whole bunch of people. Sorry, folks. Next!

I guess that makes me an asshole. (More and more things do, it seems. I wonder whether or to what extent my misanthropy is being shaped by my environment, as opposed to my consciously massaging it into shape, because it is the easy and sensible way to be.) But it doesn't mean I don't find what happened there just horrendously bad and wish that we as a society had some clue as to how to make such incidents stop. Unfortunately, one of the less pleasant things about the aftermath of the VA Tech carnage is the implication, in the press and in the blogs, that if you're not grieving, you're not a complete human being.

Whatever the reason (my heart or my shoes), the first quote from the White House dealing with this shooting made me livid: "'The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,' spokeswoman Dana Perino said."

It's not because Mr. Bush's first Hestonian reaction is a rush to defend the Second Amendment against the inevitable hordes of screaming liberal anti-gun nutcases. (Indeed, I do not believe the incident in Blacksburg sheds any new, relevant light whatever on the issue of gun ownership rights v. gun control. Whatever arguments (sensible or non-) can be made regarding the ease with which Mr. Cho legally acquired his firearms are the same arguments that proponents of gun control have been making for decades—let's have some more restrictions/waiting periods/etc.—and that gun aficionados have just as long been decrying as the harbinger of the end of civilization as we know it. I personally would prefer a system under which a nervous referral by an instructor to a school psychologist suggesting a troubled and/or unstable young man would have somehow have preempted his acquisition of firearms; but I admit I have no great suggestions for implementing such a system that would also satisfy my requirements for upholding both the right to bear arms and privacy rights. Whadayagonnado?)

No, what makes me apoplectic about that quote from the White House is that, more so than any other word or action in recent memory from this President's administration, this sorry statement points up in no uncertain terms that this President hasn't the slightest fucking clue in the world who the people of the United States are, and would give a flying fuck about them if... well, if somebody shot them. It shows that not only the President but every handler or buffer between him and the press found it a reasonable response to respond to a relatively big and nasty mass murder with a fucking policy statement.

Today, of course, he spoke repeatedly—including remarks at a memorial service in Blacksburg—about healing and courage and prayer (oh, my!), reestablishing for the 418,000th time of his regime that religious faith is a requisite quality of every true Amurrkin, and maybe getting a good word or two in for the prompt resumption of untenable retail shopping.

Next up, just wait: Reliable sources indicate Mr. Cho was financed and given orders by Iran.
fr_defenestrato: (j'accuse)
I was going to write today with some outrage (read: hysterics, thank you very much, [livejournal.com profile] bxiie) regarding Mr. Bush's latest astonishing reach for totalitarianism ("[W]e will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants") but [livejournal.com profile] rudepundit beat me to it. I really adore this guy.

I will therefore limit myself (in repayment of said thanks to bxiie, who is positively notorious for the split-second timing with which he conjures, in the face of liberal whining about the current regime, the loathesome and corrupt reign of Bill Clinton) to pointing out the unprecedented GALL, the canteloupe-sized testes that that miserable fuck in the White House has to have to even think of using a phrase like "partisan fishing expedition."

Jeebus cripes.

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