Glenn Beck Should Rot In Hell

CNN dickhead Glenn Beck decides that Martin Luther King Day is an appropriate opportunity to call the rape allegations of the Duke Lacrosse team a "lynching." Cute, Glenn.

I've written to CNN at their feedback form:

Glenn Beck consistently shames your organization with his racism and his general behavior of a 10 year old brat. But calling the Duke lacrosse team the victim of a "lynching" on Martin Luther King Day is truly beyond the pale. Absoutely nauseating. Just because people are talking about how he's an embarrassment to CNN doesn't mean you're winning some goal of "viewership." Please reconsider his role at CNN.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/15/gb.01.html

(My Two Sense, via AmericaBlog)

Sensations of His Own Weakness

Glenn Greenwald writes about how a cornered, threatened, weakened Bush is especially dangerous for us all:

The most dangerous George Bush is one who feels weak, powerless and under attack. Those perceptions are intolerable for him and I doubt there are many limits, if there are any, on what he would be willing to do in order to restore a feeling of power and to rid himself of the sensations of his own weakness and defeat.

The Sinking Ship of American Illusion

The Unapologetic Mexican on The Lie:

Though blood is spilling and fear is growing and government control is unhinging its flex like a fevered, murderous marionette due to this mad, mad idiot child at the helm of our nation, in a sense we are better off. For the Lie will never be swallowed quite so easily by quite so many. And because after this razing to the ground of the great star-spangled illusion, I am sure we will recoil, and with a passion that just may make this world a better place than it could have been were Gore or Kerry to win.

IF we survive the further destruction that Bush is clamoring to 'bring on,' that is.

As we were gearing up for the 2004 Presidential election, I remember whispers were started to be heard along these lines - that a Bush win "might not be such a bad idea," because things could get really bad before they got better, and that the bounce back my be higher than it would be otherwise (with just a single-term Bush nightmare behind us). Well, sitting here in my safety and plenty at a computer screen, of course, it's easy to say that, and - in a way - I can understand it. Wishing for it before the election is actually different than looking for a silver lining at this point, but I do believe with TUM that the Lie has been exposed for all the people of the world to see, and for America to see how our system can fail.

I'm young, though, and I imagine thoughts like this must have been going through heads post-Hiroshima and post-McCartney, too.

Feel the JoeFuckYoumtum!

Brad Altrocket from Sadly, No! is fed up:

Dear Joe Lieberman,

You are the biggest loser in the history of loserdom. You are a bigger loser than Kevin Federline. You are a bigger loser than the entire Italian Army. You are a bigger loser than the goddamned LA Clippers.


“Pointing out that Bush sucks only divides the nation!”

Read why, if you have no idea. Hint: It has to do with Katrina.

Look, Stop

You know when someone's arguing a point, and they say "Look, the real reason..." or "Well, look, it's not that..." or "Look, no one's saying..." or "Look, if we can only..."?

I can't think of a time in my life when someone says that Look and it's not irritating.

Here endeth today's complaint.

The Growth of a Child (Learning Responsibility)

8 year-old: "If there were mistakes, I'm sorry"

12 year-old: "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me"

adult: "I made a mistake. I'm sorry. It was this."

Froomkin continues:

That's a step. But the restoration of Bush's credibility on Iraq requires that he admit that he himself made mistakes, and explain what he's learned from them.

Instead, what he was saying last night was, basically: People who worked for me screwed up, and I'm jumping on the grenade. That sort of "admission" casts himself as heroic, rather than repentant.

There was no acknowledgment that he himself had ever done anything wrong. There was no contrition, no remorse, no apology, no sense that he had learned anything from the experience, no reason to hope that he'll make better decisions next time around.

Most irritating way to start an ad:

"What's your cereal's IQ?"

From a Kellogg's Start Smart cereal ad.

Clive Thompson, from Collision Detection:

Personally, I think squid-inspired design could improve anything.

Failures of "Homespun American Pseudo-Folk Wisdom"

Incredible article from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone on how the US keeps fucking up in Iraq:

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole.

You really ought to read the whole damn thing. It's a blistering piece, with lots of blistering (huh?) for Mr. Thomas Friedman.

Alleyway

DSCF5124, originally uploaded by Happykid.

No chelicerata - just a beautiful picture for a Sunday morning.

Joel McHale on TV's The Soup

If there were a Voltron-like creature created by the sum of the egos of the ladies on The View, it would have to be Tyra Banks.

As I've said before, I keep a handful of frightful rightwing blogs in my reading (malkin, etc) because a) they are entertaining, b) sometimes, like with FOX News, despite my stringent disagreement with it, often there is rich "information" within the messages, and c) the whole "know your enemy" theory.

Sometimes, tho, I read a post and I sigh and I feel like I'm looking down at a 4 year old who is hitting me with a winter hat he has been asked to put on. Mark Noonan, of Blogs for Bush, writes a mean "Why am I even wasting my eyes on this when I could be asleep or watching, say, VHS tapes of Paradise Hotel" post - this one is called "Fight Terrorism? How Dare He!":

Democrats are planning a slew of "oversight" hearings to "investigate," amongst other things the war in Iraq, and terrorist surveillance.

You get this? Apparently, fighting terrorism is a bad thing, and must be treated as a potential crime.

What should we be calling the Democrats now? Defeatist Democrats? Cut and Run Democrats? Bin Laden Democrats? It seems like they are motivated by a desire to see this country lose the war. Why? To undermine President Bush.

And they accused President Bush of being a divider, not a uniter? These liberal sickos have done nothing but divide this country. In my lifetime alone, they've committed some of the most blatant acts of treason. Whether it be Ted Kennedy's reaching out to the Soviet Union to undermine Reagan's reelection, to as recent as their opposition to the Patriot Act, the surveillance of terrorists and reaching out to our enemies to undermine Bush.

It's time to investigate the Democrats. They are deliberately trying to lose the war, and they must be held accountable.

Life Grows and Changes

I love evolution so much it makes me cry. From writer Clive Thompson, on his blog Collision Detection:

Dig this: A group of researchers has discovered that red squirrels appear to be able to predict the future.

At least, the future of the forests in which they live. American and Eurasian red squirrels live in spruce trees, and love to eat spruce tree seeds. To try and thwart the squirrels, the trees long ago evolved an interesting defense: An unpredictable boom-and-bust period of seed production. The trees will produce several low-seed years in a row and then, boom, outta nowhere and seemingly at random, a bumper crop of seeds. The idea is that the trees will starve the squirrels in the lean years, thus reducing the squirrel population -- whereupon the trees will launch a massive seed offensive to try and frantically reproduce while the squirrels are on the ropes.

But here's the thing: The squirrels have fought back. A team led by Stan Boutin of the University of Alberta studied the squirrels' mating patterns, and Boutin found something remarkable: The squirrels appear to be able to predict when the trees are going to randomly produce a bumper crop. In a high-yield year, several months before the trees produce their seeds, the squirrels engage in a second mating cycle, doubling the size of their broods. The squirrels are somehow seeing into the future of the trees -- or at least making incredibly accurate bets.

I do feel like noting that this description takes the classic inverted view of evolution than the one I prefer: species don't TRY to become something else. The ones that are still around are the ones that did a certain thing. Individual ambition, while its own wonderful thing, has nothing to do with evolution. (Feel free to show some way that it is in a comment)

The trees aren't TRYing to be like that. The ones that started doing it are in fact the ones that are still around, even better than ones who, say, started a simpler alternation of high- and low-output years.

On the squirrel side, it's a bit more complicated. We can say for sure that the squirrels aren't meeting in committees and debating the evidence, and choosing as a society what to do. But I couldn't really say what's at work here. More study needed. It's possible that the ones that are still around are the ones that have a mating cycle that somehow matches the (certainly not random) cycle of the bumper crop years, but....how strange is all that?

Okay. We're part of this now?

(David Horsey, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

File Under: Sore Losers

Tom Delay's Blog ("I write it out in longhand, and they type it") calls the bills the Democrats are introducing in their "First 100 Hours" the equivalent of "Martial Law."

What will they say once the crooks start going to JAIL?

Cheney Swears in Hillary

Cheney swears in Hillary yesterday. I don't know what Bill's doing there, but still: Priceless photo.

(Photo from the NY Times, via The Reaction)

The Washington Wire blog at the Wall Street Journal notes that at the end of a press conference Thursday evening with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (the same one the BushBoy harassed with a nauseating shoulder grab last summer), Bush made what he appears to think was a joke: "No Back Rubs"

Says one commenter:

It is amazing how many nannies this president has.

The Editors provide some serious analysis:

You could invade Sweden tomorrow, re-name it “Iraq”, and have yourself a marvelous, if slightly Nordic, Iraqi state.

A Hero To Start

Let me start off 2005 2006 2007 with a STANDING OVATION for this man.