Smile on Your Brother Now Playing: "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath
Are the kids today even trying to make good protest music? If you know of some, hip me to it, please.
To Be Reborn
All you need to know is that we've got ourselves a little break in the action. I'm looking forward to mine. Gonna hang out with my family and eat lots of good Mexican food and watch lots of boring lower-tier college football bowls and have some laughs.
And, after all, the poison in my professional life is almost all sucked out. I look foward to the recovery of my hopes and dignity.
Die Gazpacho Ist Vatching You Now Playing: sizzling hamburgers on a midsummer's night
I hear that Chimpy McHitlerburton has ordered the surveillance of vegans.
Good. Vegans are degenerate losers who hate their own human being. Moreover, they're almost certainly all Democrats ---to a [man].
Cradle
At the excellent blog Publius Pundit, Daniel Holt directs our attention to this essay by Robert M. Kimmitt, a deputy secretary with the US Department of the Treasury. The gist of it? Kimmitt says Iraq is an economic powerhouse just waiting to go online:
Iraq's economy is expected to grow by nearly 4 percent this year and accelerate to nearly 17 percent in 2006. Per capita income should soon exceed $1,000 -- nearly double the level in 2003. More than 30,000 new businesses have been registered and many have set up shop. Today in Iraq there are more than three million cell phone subscribers. In 2003 there were virtually none. Iraqi students now carry laptops that connect at Internet cafes to the world's Web sites and libraries where before they had to rely on pencils, slide rules and outdated -- often censored -- school textbooks.
If you can stand some good news, go read Kimmitt's analysis.
And then riddle me this, my droogs: why is it that the anti-war Left doesn't believe in military interventionism unless it's done by a Democrat and for the sole sake of supposedly humanitarian interests?
Why can't progressives ---which is what liberals have managed to get themselves called these days--- progress to the next level of economic understanding?
Look: we're not getting off the internal combustion engine any time soon. Nor are we migrating away from the thousands of other applications to which we put petroleum and its byproducts to use. Therefore, the struggle to keep our economy strong in the context of competing with several other awakening economic giants will require us to establish our economic and military footprint throughout the Middle East and South Asia. We have long-term interests in these regions. If our bravest men and women have fought and sacrificed for those economic interests, what nerve must you have to insult their efforts as mercenary or done at the behest of some global cabal?
The American economy ---the American ideology at the heart of that economy--- is dynamic and opportunistic. Why are we apologizing for that? We are going to have Iraq as a significant trading partner for years to come. We are going to see a cultural shift across the Middle East that starts right there in Baghdad. These are huge achievements in the offing ---and what do the anti-Bush Leftists want to do about it?
Not Believing My Ears Now Playing: that really funny scene from the original star trek series where spock says kirk cant believe his own ears
I don't remember who I was watching, but a reporter on the news last night said that if the transit strike in New York City actually went through, it would cost the city something like $500,000,000 a day.
A day?! I thought she must have misread her script.
But then I'm watching all this coverage on the news channels tonight and everybody's saying it's like a $400,000,000 daily loss of economic activity.
Four hundred million dollars a day?!
That is absolutely incredible. I couldn't believe that!
Those guys had better get serious in a damned hurry. Outrageous!
Tuesday Afternoon
I don't know why, but more people check out this blog at lunchtime on Tuesdays than at any other time of the week.
If that's what's up with you, then good afternoon.
And keep scrolling down because I've gone off the deep end here the past few days. There's more to read when you get to the bottom of the page: just click on "Older" and you're on your way.
Kicking against the Pricks
Michelle Malkin directs my attention to John McIntyre's excellent take on the Democrats' pursuit of this NSA eavesdropping thing. In a word, it's a loser:
[...]Democrats still do not grasp that foreign affairs and national security issues are their vulnerabilities, not their strengths. All of the drumbeat about Iraq, spying, and torture that the left thinks is so damaging to the White House are actually positives for the President and Republicans. Apparently, Democrats still have not fully grasped that the public has profound and long-standing concerns about their ability to defend the nation. As long as national security related issues are front page news, the Democrats are operating at a structural political disadvantage. Perhaps the intensity of their left wing base and the overwhelmingly liberal press corps produces a disorientation among Democratic politicians and prevents a more realistic analysis of where the country’s true pulse lies on these issues.
It's a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking. Go check it out.
"Well, I just had to la-augh..." Now Playing: "Day in the Life" by the Beatles
Did you see this crap in the news today?
Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran's radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution. Songs such as George Michael's "Careless Whisper," Eric Clapton's "Rush" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" have regularly accompanied Iranian broadcasts, as do tunes by saxophonist Kenny G.
But the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of Iran's Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban Western music.
"Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required," according to a statement on the council's official Web site.
I'm not sure why the aforementioned titles were the first to come to the reporter's mind, but it somehow makes the ban even more pathetic, if that's possible.
The Worst Part of Being an Atheist
You know what's the worst part of being an atheist? You have no one to be thankful to. I miss that sometimes more than I'd like to say.
So, for my New Year's resolution, I'd like to start having sex again.
Letter Trumps Spirit
Duncan Black is trying to throw us off his trail by declaring that he is not stupid, but read what he says about the New York Times' report that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the phone conversations of potential terrorists:
So, publishing the fact that Bush has decided he can spy on people without warrants is going to damage national security even though we already had a very public policy which allowed us to do the same by getting a warrant which didn't even have to really be gotten until 72 hours after the spying began?
Once again, I must ask: if these search warrants are so easily obtained, then what does that say about the oversight that the FISA courts provide? Isn't it more likely that the President's order to the NSA is a matter of acting in exigent circumstances to protect the American people? That isn't something that depends on retroactive authorizations ---which is a meaningless procedural burden to anyone who thinks about it for five seconds. Instead, Bush's order has been subject to dozens of reviews to guarantee that no civil liberties have been trampled on unnecessarily. What else should matter?
If it makes you feel better, Duncan, I'm sure that no court in the land would admit those eavesdropped recordings at trial without a prior search warrant. So buck up: your instinct to sympathize with and demand the rights of murderers to a fair trial is undiminished.
Bush is a lying criminal.
And a wanker.
Clearly, Duncan Black is a brave man to test the chilly waters of the Fourth Reich like this. After all, hundreds of bloggers have already been rounded up and concentrated in camps: doesn't he know he could be next?
Sympathize! Now Playing: "Time of the Season" by the Zombies
Condoleezza Rice just told Tim Russert that the President's NSA eavesdropping program is restricted to spying on those who have links to al-Qaeda.
If this is true ---and were reported with the same conspicuity as the breathless headlines saying the President is spying on YOU--- then no thinking American would object.
But since most Americans get their news from the pro-Democrat Big Media machine, the full story won't get through. People will only know that the President is spying on American citizens because that's what's interesting ---and not the fact that he is only spying on the enemies of our country.
Enjoy your shit pie, liberals. Now you can tell us why you are in the position of defending the right of al-Qaedists to communicate from our own soil with those who are helping them plot mass murder.
Democratize the Press!
My recommendation to the Bush White House is that they start choking off Big Media outlets that don't know what time it is. They should start leaking their own information to friendlies in the blogosphere. Make the fuckers who run the networks and the major dailies go crawling the Internet if they want to get in on the action.
That would move the center of gravity of public opinion in a very interesting way.
The whole Big Media dynamic could be changed in short order if this recommendation were implemented.
The Threshold of Unprecedence Now Playing: "Break It Up" by Foreigner
Via Michelle Malkin, go read this beautiful essay by Jeff Harrell at The Shape of Days:
For the first time in six hundred generations, the people of Iraq are truly free. Not by coincidence, not because of some random confluence of events, but because a group of determined visionaries and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from dozens of nations acted with swift resolve to make it so.
How can any of us not be rendered speechless by that?
Thankfully, Harrell overcomes his awe. Check it out. I think the guy knows what he's telling you.
My Compliments to the 2005 Hutto Hippos Mood: a-ok
I know you boys are hurtin' right now, but there's a lot of people in this area ---this region--- who are mighty proud of you tonight.
Don't forget: you set a new standard for your community.
Almost Stepped on a Cockroach Now Playing: Hamlet's famous soliloquy
Jeff Goldstein directs us to this report of an assassination attempt on Iranian psychopath Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
Tehran, Iran, Dec. 17 – One of the bodyguards of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was killed and another wounded when an attempt to ambush the presidential motorcade was thwarted in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, according to a semi-official newspaper and local residents.
“At 6:50 pm on Thursday, the lead car in the presidential motorcade confronted armed bandits and trouble-makers on the Zabol-Saravan highway”, the semi-official Jomhouri Islami reported on Saturday.
“In the ensuing armed clash, the driver of the vehicle, who was an indigenous member of the security services, and one of the president’s bodyguards died, while another bodyguard was wounded”, the newspaper, which was founded by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote.
This may very well be some sort of martyrific pantomime made to order for domestic consumption in Iran, but it would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Fisking Rider
For some reason, I've been privileged to have a very thoughtful and insistent commenter at this site who goes by the name of Rider. He writes (below, in italics) to chide me for my defense of the NSA leak in the New York Times yesterday:
Good for the Times. You know they withheld the story for a year. And why? Because the White House claimed that it would compromise national security. Read: jeapordize Bush's re-election.
Funnily enough, our national security did depend on Bush's re-election last year. So, in this case, your translation is correct.
A clear example of the White House using its national security powers as an abusable political weapon to strengthen its grip on power.
Civil libertarians too often conceive of civil liberties only in the abstract, free of any complicating impurities such as contingency or even reality itself. But you do have an obligation to understand that Americans do not exercise their rights in the same ways in every phase of our history. The pendulum swings. Maybe we're just playing our parts in arguing the point, but the difference in this time is that we are in a war of some unprecedence, including most especially the instantaneity and ubiquity of communications of every kind. If, in the race to keep up with the cellular or Internet communications of our enemies, our intelligence services sometimes listen in on something without prior approval (which, I suspect, is largely pro forma, anyway), then I am not going to sweat it. I'm not going to go on and on about the travesty being done against our liberties because I know why our agencies are eavesdropping. I think you do, too, but don't want to miss the chance to unload on the Chimperor.
You wouldn't know a totalitarian police state if it jumped up and bit you in the ass.
Your suggestion is ludicrous. Big Brother isn't bothering with us in this forum. Why should he?
You mock the very liberties our troops are sworn to defend.
More hyperbole.
Your faith in the government to know what is best for you and not to use their power as an abusable political weapon is touching. Was that what you were saying during Filegate, btw?
And what was the contingency that justified the Clintons' deliberate and premeditated spying? I'll bet that question is more easily answered in the present case.
Note that it was NSA intelligence officers - real American patriots - who blew the whistle on this (or tried to a year ago). They did it because they were alarmed by the illegal powers Bush (Bush and only Bush) tried to push on them as he turned an agency for foreign spying - the most powerful and most secret we have - against Americans on American soil.
I very much doubt your characterization of those who leaked this information. That is to say, it was probably someone like Dick Clarke (the notorious war profiteer) who handed this shit to the Times in an effort to politically damage the President. Which makes it treason.
They were disturbed that he had not even made use of the special, secret rubber-stamp court the Patriot Act itself had provided for approving surveillance and which routinely approved all requests! Is that too much to ask?
Well, Rider. I think you've given the game away. If you, too, concede that the prior approval of a FISA court is just a "rubber stamp," then what's with the moral outrage here? You have no respect for the authorization required, so why the pretense?
Liberals-are-traitors is a Rovian refrain almost constantly being pumped out on the RNC talking point faxes.
I don't have that sort of fax machine. Or any, for that matter.
You tell us here on a daily basis there is no difference between some real Americans and would-be Muslim murderers. Mother Sheehan leaps to mind.
I don't understand this. It is undeniable that Sheehan is a Jew-hating terrorist-sympathizer and Leftist. She has devoted her life for the past year or so to undermining the morale of the American serviceman. I don't know why she's doing it except that she might be mad.
It is no stretch to suggest that people who do not hesitate to call their political enemies traitors or roadside bomber-dhimmies or terrorist-lovers or Al Qaeda-sympathizers might literally decide to surveil its political enemies...for reasons of national security, of course.
Let's have some names! Where is your evidence that Bush has spied on a Democratic Representative or Senator or even Mother Sheehan?
We just learned this week that anti-war protesters had been surveilled recently. Who exactly did the NSA surveil? I don't know. And you don't either. No one is watching the watchers.
Not to be too cynical, but I can't think of any Leftist or anti-war/anti-Bush activist who would not benefit immensely from the disclosure that he or she had been spied on by Bushitler. It would absolutely be the greatest thing that had ever happened to the fucking moron.
Dare Call It Treason Mood: on fire
I am very pleased to see that this President is fighting back against the traitors in our government and in Big Media who disclosed the NSA eavesdropping story yesterday.
Listen to what the man said in his radio address this morning:
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.
This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.
Mr. President, I recommend that you get Stephen Hadley on the case post haste. If that means the son of bitch has to work Christmas Day, so be it, but you need to find the worthless Plame-like fuckers who are leaking these stories to the New York Times and the other propaganda organs of the Left and prosecute them for treason.
Don't tell me about how we're no better than our enemies when we listen in on communications between young Muslim men from the Middle East and their benefactors back home. The NSA isn't listening to and doesn't care about Aunt Madge's gossip; they're trying to figure out whether Mo is cooking up death for our fellow Americans. Quit seeing everything through the prism of pure Constitutional principles and recognize that this is a dangerous time that requires extraordinary measures.
If the NSA listening in on some towelheads' phone calls is why we haven't seen a terrorist attack on our soil in four years, then I'll take that trade every time, comrade.
Keep up the good work, Mr. President. When these snivelling Leftist tools lie and dissemble and propagandize and leak information to undermine you and our troops and our national security, fight back, sir. FIGHT BACK!!!
Squaring Some Ass
I'm not going to go looking for all the gossip that's out there right now about it, but there's a story that's being widely reported in the local media tonight about two possible criminal incidents involving at least two of the starters for my Texas Longhorns football team.
I'm not going to mention the names, but I hope that this is just a lot of bullshit.
I'll say this much, though: there are a lot of big names in this town talking in offices and over phones at this very hour. You're talking major movers, baby ---men that get their way with a word.
I Can Hear You through the Wires Now Playing: "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell I realized a long time ago that I can't really draw in the naturalistic way I would like to, but I can make these excessively rote and highly-stylized shapes and lines. There is practically no variation in these doodles ---and hasn't been in many, many years. It's almost like it would ruin whatever the thought might be at the moment I begin these designs to try to introduce whimsy into them.
They are my brain dumping its neural diagram cache.
Colluders
Are we supposed to believe, as Ann Kornblut does, that there was no collusion between her paper's report today that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping on phone calls without search warrants and the use of that story on the floor of the U.S. Senate during a filibustered vote to reauthorize certain parts of the Patriot Act?
Well, the non-collusion worked: the renewal failed.
Here's New York Senator Charles Schumer on just how influential the report was:
"I went to bed undecided," Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor, "but today's revelation that the government has listened in on thousands of phone conversations is shocking and has greatly influenced my vote."
I understand that the Patriot Act is a great potential intrusion upon the civil liberties of all Americans, but the fact is that this law has been used relatively sparingly ---and not as an abusable political weapon.
Let's not forget the context in which the Patriot Act was passed: that of a war against the enemies of Civilization. I'm sure it's romantic and daring to declare that our Bill of Rights is being burnt before our eyes, but it's nonsense. There are contingencies in times of war that would be real threats in times of peace. For instance, we would not want a President ---who is also the leader of his own political party--- to authorize NSA telecommunication intercepts on his domestic opponents at any time. But as we fight a global war against Islamofascist murderers, I want my President to spy all he wants on Muslim immigrants and converts. I couldn't care less whether the NSA or CIA or FBI ignores FISA court search warrants. If these guys can catch wind of some terrorist strike or of some operational detail by listening to Mo call his uncle back in Riyadh, good on 'em.
We live with a lot of illusions in a democratic society. One of them is the idea that we are presumed innocent of whatever crimes we've been charged with until proved guilty. Well, the state wouldn't bother to prosecute us if they didn't think we were guilty, so such a presumption is a little fiction.
Another illusion is the idea that we aren't already being monitored. Credit reporting agencies, financial institutions, credit card companies, law enforcement, the insurance industry, et al: Big Brother owns our asses every time we buy a meal or pay a bill or click on a webpage. It would be nothing to the state to dig up every major or minor fact of our lives if it wanted to. But I don't think the state cares that much to devote its time and resources to spying on its own people. I think the state does care to spy on people who have come to our shores to do harm.
And, at that, I say get to it.
Don't pretend there's not a difference between real Americans and these would-be Muslim murderers.
a-ok
on fire
I realized a long time ago that I can't really draw in the naturalistic way I would like to, but I can make these excessively rote and highly-stylized shapes and lines. There is practically no variation in these doodles ---and hasn't been in many, many years. It's almost like it would ruin whatever the thought might be at the moment I begin these designs to try to introduce whimsy into them.