Hey all.. Happy New Year! Thanks for hanging with me over my off-and-on again blogging this year. It's been five and half years since I started blogging over on Blogspot...something close to 3500 posts authored with tender loving care and a jaundiced eye by yours truly.

So off we go to make fun of, be rude to and generally be as annoying as possible to the 22-percenters and True Believers for this election year and all it's follies and their foibles.

Be safe out there tonight, and see ya next year... My New Years wish? Every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine comes home safely before the political conventions this year, and gets the welcome home they deserve and the unconditional support of our Nation.

Peace,

Jo

This is funny... what's in store for Preznit Drunk at the Wheel over the next twelve months of his temper-tantrum based dictatorship presidency.

Bush's year begins with a nine-day trip to the Middle East, a hands-on peacemaking venture that could shape his legacy - a word that Bush and his senior aides don't use.

So I'll just go with Putz.

Heh. Indeed.

Buoyed by the still unsettled field, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run.
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Former Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who organized the session with former Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat of Georgia, suggested in an interview that if the prospective major party nominees failed within two months to formally embrace bipartisanship and address the fundamental challenges facing the nation, "I would be among those who would urge Mr. Bloomberg to very seriously consider running for president as an independent."

But, as the infomercials say, Wait! There's More!!

Bloomberg aides have studied the process for starting independent campaigns, which formally begins March 5, when third-party candidates can begin circulating nominating petitions in Texas. If Democrats and Republicans have settled on their presumptive nominees at that point, Mr. Bloomberg will have to decide whether he believes those candidates are vulnerable to a challenge from a pragmatic, progressive centrist, which is how he would promote himself.

A truly funny thing would be a Bloomberg candidacy if Giulani is the republican presumptive nominee... I could see it in a debate..."excuse ME, Mr. Giuliani, but these receipts are from the Loft Board, and these pictures are of potholes filled with the ashes from Ground Zero". I'd pay money to see that...

Oh, teh stupid! It burns! In this day and age of virtually instant access to facts (and even this website) you'd think that the Chinese government which, remarkably owns the factories that build a goodly bit of the telco equipment (and end-user computers) that "power" the inter-tubes would understand the idea... information is not readily containable. But, they are after all totalitarians in every sense of the word, including being able to grasp ideas that don't fit their preconceived notions of reality (sort of like Beloved Leader, but I'm not calling him a Totalitarian).

Anyhow...

About 200 Tsinghua University journalism students filled a classroom one recent Friday evening for a two-hour lecture on the political history of Tibet.

The mountainous territory has always been an inalienable part of China, they were told, and the Dalai Lama is a sly traitor hiding behind his Buddhist religion to promote secession. The lecture, a rendition of China's standard government line, put some students to sleep, but most listened patiently.
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...Journalism students at Tsinghua are taught not only about Watergate and the rise of the Internet, but also about the restricted role reporters are expected to play under a Marxist government such as China's.

In China, that role traditionally has been to support the government by spreading propaganda and suppressing news that contradicts policy or puts officials in a bad light. ...

Judy Miller could give her first lecture on how to co-opt a US Army unit to make your boyfriend happy and maybe she could also discuss how better cocktail weenies make better presidential candidates. She might even be able to get Ceci Connelly to come be a guest lecturer. Now there's some great journalasmismum.

And afterwards, everyone can retire to their bungalow to get a massage from Jeff Gannon, compliments of the ol' Bulldog himself.

Gak.

The crumbling GoOPer republican candidates and their minions just can't help but to diminish the sacrifices of America soldiers who have given their lives in Iraq when it serves their ends...

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson has never been one to linger too long shaking hands. He is a deliberative man, who campaigns in short bursts, and enjoys his private time as much as anyone. So when he finished speaking here Wednesday night, in the cramped back room of a restaurant, he never stopped working his way to the exit door. ...
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Nearly a dozen of his potential supporters remained, however. They circled around Thompson's state chairman, Rep. Steve King, the man who just might lift the struggling campaign to a halfway decent finish in the nation's first caucus state. A popular state conservative, King was holding court, as he often does, on the issue of illegal immigration, which he speaks of as a crisis on par with the war in Iraq.

"The casualties in America are greater on average by far than they are in Iraq," he announced, citing dubious back-of-the-envelope estimates about the number of American homicides committed by people without citizenship.

If any Democrat had made a similar statement you know that the wingnut manufactured outrage machine would be howling at full volume and the candidate responsible would be conducting a ceremonial and very public shit-canning of some flunky followed by endless media "mea culpas".

It will be interesting to see if Thompson says anything about King's assertion, but given that he's running on the dog-whistle politics of immigration, magic 8-ball says "doubtful".

In the movie "V is for Vendetta" the police chief inspector replies to his co-worker who asks what's going to happen when all the Londoners congregate to see Westminster Abbey blown up..."What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns". I suspect that the chaos is only beginning in Pakistan, a country we can not afford to have in chaos because unlike Iraq and Iran they actually have working nukes and delivery systems.

Angry protesters burned cars and shops into the night following the assassination Thursday of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

"It's all mayhem everywhere," Shehryar Ahmad, an investment banker in Karachi, told CNN by telephone Thursday night. "There's absolutely no order of any kind. No army on the streets. No curfew."
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In Sindh province, where Karachi is located, police said demonstrators had burned a dozen banks and set two train stations on fire, along with three trains. Since Thursday, 240 vehicles have been burned.

Because of the violence, paramilitary forces in Sindh were told to "shoot on site" anyone causing civil disturbances, a spokesman for the Pakistan Rangers said.

Beloved Glorious Leader is always invoking the Terrarists™ to make his case against anyone who will stand up to him, but his enabling of Musharraf and his cronys by feeding them over Five Billion Dollars in no-strings attached aid has to count as one of the all-time foreign policy disasters in history. Now the waiting begins to see how long it will be before all the bad people we have been warned about take over Pakistan, funded in large part by the our tax dollars.

Thanks, you miserable failure... you've done it again.

Seems that St. Rudy of 9/11 and his magic lobbying'n'law firm, Giuliani Partners might have themselves a bit of a PR problem. See, Rudy! was a "consultant" for Purdue Pharma the company that made Oxycontin. Pretty much seems he was selected by Purdue for his expertise not in pharmaceuticals but in being "America's Mayor", that and being the only living person to make a living out of being able to use a noun, a verb and 9/11 twenty-four seven.

In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse.
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As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.
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Dennis Lee, the Virginia state prosecutor for Tazewell County, an area hard hit by OxyContin abuse, said he was stunned several years ago to learn that Mr. Giuliani was working for Purdue. He had a favorable impression of Mr. Giuliani, he said, and a poor opinion of the company, which he said had played down and dissembled about its drug’s problem.

"I was shocked,” Mr. Lee said, “that he would basically become a mouthpiece for Purdue."
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Asa Hutchinson , the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2002, hardly needed an introduction to Mr. Giuliani. So it was perhaps not surprising that Purdue chose Mr. Giuliani as the person to meet with Mr. Hutchinson at a time when the drug maker was under intense scrutiny by the D.E.A.

A noun, a verb and 9/11 is not a qualifier for the presidency. An outstretched hand is even less of one.

Apparently the CIA has destroyed some tapes to "protect" the identities of it's members who could be "retaliated against" by terrarists™ for their participation in torture. The reality is that these tapes, which by the way were never acknowledged when Judges and trial counsels asked and demanded their production in court proceedings were destroyed to potentially save the torturers from prosecution.

Now if you're not torturing, why the need to lie about it? Certainly a cover-up is bad form...why not hold a seance and ask the ghost of Tricky Dick.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A's secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects - including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody - to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.
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The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made "within the C.I.A. itself," and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

I guess that the tapes might have also put lie to yet another of Preznit Prevarication's convenient fictions, "we don't torture", because if we don't why does anyone need to destroy the evidence?

Hey, Nancy...Yo!: Impeachment is the Cure. Oh yeah, I might have mentioned that before.

Oh, for the days of Rosemary Woods.

I saw an interesting story the other day about a Brazilian Supermodel who just signed a contract with an agency, and in the contract stipulated that she be paid only in Euros. Apparently she's not alone in her demands to not take dollar-denominated payment, preferring the Euro instead thanks to out Idiot Bastard Tax-cutting Fuckhead Preznit.

Now for those of you who have stuck with me through my ups and downs, perhaps you'll remember this which I wrote a while ago. I have been "going on" about the 1600 Crew's fical policies as a matter of true National Security for a long time, no one really seemed to care much which I always thought was interesting... I guess that minutae like that are only interesting on a wonk level, but now it's starting to take it's toll as we become the most leveraged country in the history of the world and our currency is becoming as irrelevant as our Beloved Leader.

Imminent Collapse Ahead? No, but electing a republican who will continue us on this path will surely lead us there. I have heard none of them save Ron Paul even express the slightest doubts that the destructive policies of the last seven years need to be maintained and even expanded on...and other than Paul's anti-war and fiscal rhetoric there's nothing in that man's talking points that moves him out of the way-right wingnutosphere, sorry Ron.

Yeah, so I spent about 30 minutes today (which I will never get back) watching Mitt trash the First and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution and never once mentioning (or did I miss it) the word/name "Mormon". If this was supposed to be a speech about his faith, it was nothing but 30 minutes of standard christo-facist blather about "faith" and how every Founding Father would have gladly tithed to the Christian Coalition while putting up a Nativity Creche in their town square.

I also guess that Mitt and all his talk of "violent radical Islam" that seeks conversion by force needs to go back and read what the crusades were all about, hell he just needs to read what Ann Coulter said and she nominally professes the Jesus Christ thing.

I guess that if you are not a believer, in Mitt Romney's America you don't exist.

Shorter Mitt Romney: "Athiests Need Not Apply in Mitt Romney's America".

Update(s): Apparently Mitt did say the word "Mormon" once in his speech. Not bad for being a practicing you know, Mormon. Proud of that fact there, Mittley?

Even the normally obtuse Washington Post Editorial Page aka Fred Hiatt's whiteboard got it right about the MittSpeech. Good for them.

Still unemployed. I hate this. Gee, I'm not on the 1600 Crew "unemployment numbers" though, having never filed for unemployment. I wonder how many more there are like me out here, and how it would skew their rosy numbers if they counted me and people like me.

Been about two and a half years. Making money by doing "pick-up" work where and when I can. Sorry for the continued lack of blogging... perhaps I'll have to get more into it now that we have the Rudy scandal du jour and Mormon Mitt the Muslim-hater is out there beating his well-shellacked head into a wall o'Huck...

Pass the popcorn with government butter on it please.

Calling Nancy Pelosi, Calling Nancy effing Pelosi.

The White House is refusing to let special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald turn over to congressional investigators key documents from his investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative, including reports of interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and five top White House aides.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman disclosed this morning that Fitzgerald is cooperating with the congressional investigation and had agreed to turn over the documents -- until the White House intervened.

There is no excuse anymore for not going after these assholes hammer and tongs, and now that's coming to mean the Pelosi-Emmanuel wing of the Democratic party as well as the republican enablers of Beloved Leader.

Perhaps a third-party might be warranted: An Impeachment Party.

What a set of balls this asshat has. Seriously, for a man who has spent less time actually working than any other president in recent memory, he's got very little room to talk.

"Congress returns from its two-week Thanksgiving break today," the president said at a Rose Garden appearance. "They have just two weeks to go before they leave town again. That's not really a lot of time to squeeze in nearly a year’s worth of unfinished business."

Mr. Bush chided Democrats for trying to impose conditions on a $50 billion emergency financing bill for the Iraq war, and asserted that many critics of his policy have conceded that this year's increase in American troop strength has produced good results. "It is time for members of Congress to meet their responsibility to our men and women in uniform, and they should stay in session until they pass these emergency funds for our troops."

And if it's all about the money for the troops, well then start economizing by taking money from the contractor budgets that has already been appropriated and give it to the troops. Or is that too simple?

Oh, and if I were a Congressional Staffer or oppo-research person, I'd be looking up exactly how many days Beloved Leader has been "on vacation" or out fundraising while in office and publicizing that number. Neither of those two items, vacation or fundraising are in his job description as Fearless Leader, but they are as All-American Jackass #1.

Well, well. Looks like someone is raining (or reigning) in the NeoCon fabulist all-war all the time parade. Iran halted weapons development in 2003. Hmmmm, there goes an exigent case for war.

Iran halted its "nuculer" weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure, and while it continues to develop an enriched uranium program, it apparently has not resumed moving toward a nuclear capability, according to a consensus judgment of the U.S. intelligence community released today by Director of National Intelligence John M. McConnell.
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According to the document, Iran is considered "highly unlikely" to be technically capable now of producing enough highly enriched weapons grade uranium for a weapon before 2009. With "moderate confidence," the report puts that date at 2010 and probably not before 2015.

All that remains is for the NeoFucks to get Preznit Utterly Incompetant to leave yet another mess in place for the 2008 elections to ensure that the likelihood of a republican presidency ever again will be slim-to-none. I put nothing past the Lost Village Idiot, nor the evil Darth Cheney Cabal. I also put nothing past the right-wing idiots who will see this report as their own smoking mushroom cloud.

But then I've been wrong before.

1. Happy New Year
   
2. One word
   
3. Rudy v Bloomie?
   
4. Does Judy Miller get a visiting Professor gig?
   
5. Demogogues4Ever
   
6. The Benazir Aftermath beigns
   
7. This is gonna leave a mark (I hope)
   
8. When 18 minutes looked good
   
9. Econ 101, again
   
10. Sermon of the Mitt