Born September 17, 1787
Died August 4, 2007
RIP
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Saturday, August 4, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Harry's Hooey Dog And Pony Show
On the surface, and from what people all over the blogosphere are saying, you would think that Harry Reid's announcement on Monday that he, as the Democratic Senate leader, was going to get tough and make the Republicans filibuster through Tuesday night was some type of seminal turning point. The Democrats are finally getting some cojones and standing up to the Republican thugs obstructing progress in the Senate. But, if you really start digging a little, it appears that there is still a cloture vote set for Wednesday morning irrespective of what occurs in between now and then in the Senate, and the Democrats still must obtain 60 votes for that cloture vote on Wednesday morning in order for the bill to go to an up or down vote on the floor. Come Wednesday morning, the Democrats will still be short of the 60 votes necessary to gain cloture and have an up or down vote on the merits of the bill. And this all assumes that Reid can get a quorum in the first place. Why any Republican would show up for this nonsense is hard to imagine. Tim Johnson is not fit to attend, and Lieberman, well, he is just not fit period, and will undoubtedly not be helping his former party. A quorum (51 Senators) may be difficult to gather.
Oh, and about that all important "30 hour" provision that has been so ballyhooed. It doesn't apparently apply as that is the maximum length of debate that can be had AFTER a successful cloture vote of 60 or more votes which, again, the Democrats still appear to be well short of. Some solace can be taken from the fact that the Levin/Reed Bill is a toothless pile of pablum that does absolutely nothing to force the Administration to initiate withdrawal from Iraq in the first place, so no great loss.
Unless I am missing something in this analysis, the only way Harry's hooey stands to have any impact is if Reid keeps repeating the stunt over and over, requiring the calendar of the Senate be cleared for the remainder of the little prime time left before their recess. But Harry Reid won't do that; which makes this a pretty weak and lame gesture. It may get some PR, but it also is an admission of how gutless our leaders really are.
It is time to "end our long national nightmare". Defund the war (funding bills do not require the 60 vote cloture step; they go to a regular vote), and, if Bush doesn't bring the troops home, impeach him and then put him in the criminal docks for the wiretapping violations and any other crimes for which there is solid probable cause. I am tired of Harry Reid's pansy charades and the respective Judiciary Committee's lame letters begging the Administration to pretty please play nice. Lets get on with it.
There's more: "Harry's Hooey Dog And Pony Show" >>
Sunday, June 10, 2007
A Soldier By Any Other Name
Some things just make your blood boil. There have been many things like that recently for me. But none so much as the op-ed article wrtitten by Fouad Ajami for Friday's Wall Street Journal. I will let Mr. Ajami's words speak for themselves:
"In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics.
.....snip......
He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own."
What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Wow, this Fouad Ajami guy must be some kind of dedicated American soldier, with a heroic record of bravery, to have the cojones to make this statement right? Eh, not so much. Fouad Ajami is a native of Lebanon who has lived in the United States since 1963. Never so much as been a bugle boy in a ROTC squad. He's got zip for military service; but he is very fond of war, as long as it is not him, his friends, or their families fighting in it. Who are his friends? You need not have asked. They are, of course, Wolfowitz (a mentor of sorts), Cheney, Candiliar Rice, Kristol, the fine citizens at the Council of Foreign Relations, and every other leading neocon in sight. There is not a freaking one of them that has ever been in a uniform or seen a drop of blood shed for their follies. This sick little prick needs to be sent back home to Lebanon immediately. There, he should be able to view first hand the war ravaged handiwork of minds like his.
Numerous other writers have already noted the absurdity of Ajami's incendiary comments about Libby when juxtaposed against the real American soldiers dying and being maimed by the thousands for this charlatan's frivolity, and that is so true. But there is another soldier that has fallen casualty to the neocon's war of belligerent choice. The soldier taken out of service to her country by Libby, and the treasonous conduct which he ended up in the dock for in the first place. Valerie Plame Wilson, a woman who spent over twenty years serving her country in the clandestine division of the CIA, nearly a third of which was overseas and undercover. A woman who was the leader of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction anti-proliferation group in the CIA at the time she was heinously outed by cowards like Libby, Cheney and Ajami. If my thin blood is boiling, Valerie Plame Wilson's must be running like double habernero hot sauce.
The real soldiers lost as a result of the Iraq war don't mean a tinker's damn to the neocon cowards, nor do their death and destruction, but the thought of poor pasty little Scooter serving a couple of years in Club Fed before returning to his life of leisure and wealth, now that gets their panties all twisted. I am going to end this article with the dead on accurate thoughts of of a fellow commenter at The Next Hurrah, JGabriel, because I could not possibly say it better:
"Well, if Libby is a 'soldier' in the war (in Iraq? on Terror? against Liberals?), then so was Valerie Wilson.
Which means Libby isn't so much the 'fallen' soldier as he is the one who stabbed a fellow soldier in the back, left her bleeding on the ground, and posted a sign next to her saying 'Desecrate This U.S. Corpse'.
With that reasoning in mind, Libby should be court-martialed, at the very least."
There's more: "A Soldier By Any Other Name" >>
Monday, May 21, 2007
So the reich-wing wants a piece of the internet pie, eh?
This is our turf.
Deal.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
But implicit in his cheerleading was the acknowledgment that there is a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Internet, and that his party will have to scramble to catch up. "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," he said in an interview.
Michael Turk, who was in charge of Internet strategy for President Bush's 2004 campaign -- puts the problem his party faces more bluntly: "We're losing the Web right now."
But implicit in his cheerleading was the acknowledgment that there is a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Internet, and that his party will have to scramble to catch up. "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," he said in an interview.
THEY. JUST. DON’T. GET. IT.
And they can't stand it.
But an underlying cause may be the nature of the Republican Party and its traditional discipline -- the antithesis of the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet.
"We've always been a party of staying on message," All said. "It's the Rush Limbaugh model. What Tony Snow says in the White House filters down to talk radio, which makes its way to the blogs."
“What Tony Snow says in the White House filters down to talk radio, which makes its way to the blogs."
Have you read this site ? –(Or any other liberal blog, for that fact.)– Can you imagine any of the bloggers here (or any other liberal bloggers, for that fact) taking marching orders from any damned body?
Seriously! Not gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
There's more: "So the reich-wing wants a piece of the internet pie, eh?" >>
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