"...the testy Messiah driven to apoplexy by his obtuse apostles..."

"Bill O'Reilly intends to take part in a USO tour of Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as he's able to have Judith Regan's cell phone removed from his ass. Its ringing late at night from deep in his echoing cavern has been cost him precious hours of sleep and making him a shade grumpy over his morning oatmeal, fed to him through a slit in the door."

That's chortle-on-the-job-worthy. James Wolcott is my blog-o'-the-week.

Carbon-based salt bloats

"If a soldier has experienced a betrayal of what's right by those in charge, their capacity for social trust can be impaired for the rest of their lives."--VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay There's an incredible article this month in the Santa Fe Reporter that really gets into the vast increase in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the Iraq War veteran community. It's a pretty bleak assessment of the situation, but one that must be read. Meanwhile, down in south Mississippi, the Sun Herald is running a story about Trent Lott's current sentiments regarding Rumsfeld's latest gaffe: "I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld," Lott, R-Mississippi, told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday morning. "I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers." It's a start, I suppose. And now, for something completely ridiculous from one of my favorite hacks, Peggy Noonan:

It is this: Stop the war on religious expression in America. Have Terry McAuliffe come forward and announce that the Democratic Party knows that a small group of radicals continue to try to "scrub" such holidays as Christmas from the public square. They do this while citing the Constitution, but the Constitution does not say it is wrong or impolite to say "Merry Christmas" or illegal to have a crèche in the public square. The Constitution says we have freedom of religion, not from religion. Have Terry McAuliffe announce that from here on in the Democratic Party is on the side of those who want religion in the public square, and the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall for that matter. Then he should put up a big sign that says "Merry Christmas" on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters on South Capitol Street. The Democratic Party should put itself on the side of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and the fact of transcendent faith.

WOW. I'm glad she's joined in the conversation that was so graciously brough forth by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and that rat-bastard, Brent Bozell. I totally want a ride inside the zero-gravity neocon echo-chamber for Christmas this year.

And the winner is...Cynthia Nixon?

According to a certain newsie's website, Chevy Chase will be the buzz of the 'morn tomorrow. He called Dubya a dumb fuck in front of an audience at the Kennedy Center. Later in the evening, Cynthia Nixon stepped up to the plate and tried to smoothe things out with some sound advice:

"Don't just listen to people who are telling you yes, listen to the people who are telling you no!"

Moving on, as it were...there's a great post on pro-life Democrats where Atrios (aka Duncan Black), of the blog Eschaton handled the dialouge with the kind of succinctness that makes you wonder why you couldn't have said it so palpably:

Well, I'm not pro-abortion. I'm not anti-abortion. I'm anti-unwanted pregnancy. Frankly, I'm not particularly concerned about abortion rates as any sort of morality issue. Nor am I interested in any political campaign which implicitly shames women who have them.

It seems like pro-life Democrats who honestly recognize that the platform of the party is unlikely to change just want people like me to admit that abortion is "icky" to make them feel better. Well, I'm not going to do that.

When I started reading his blog, then participating in the conversation after-the-fact, I got this feeling that his loyal readers were almost cult-like. I totally get it now. He's wonky in that Sirota/Conason/Harvie kind of way. Sexy.

That's all for now.

South Park is on.

Commercial.

The Most Offensive Christmas Special EVER.

Lion cubs gave Kyle an abortion. Forest critters had an immaculate conception of the dark lord. They chose a Jew to be the host of the aforementioned Lord. Santa brought a lion back to life. Oh, and Amanda didn't win the America's Next Top Model competition. It's kind of a bummer, but at least she has all of that exposure plus a killer porfolio upon her departure.

"These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."

That's what Bill Kristol said in his op/ed today in the WaPo. It's like the Lord of the Flies over in the pitched army-tent of the Republican party. Surprisingly enough, I remember some of the main themes from the book:

• If power isn't earned, people WILL abuse it.
• One can cover up his/her inner monster for only so long before it comes out and bites EVERYONE ELSE in the ass.
• If given the chance, people will often seek to degrade those that are weaker in order to improve their own security.
• Fear of the unknown will either lead you to insightful problem-solving, OR straight-up hysteria.

So there ya go. When left to their own devics, people in power will eventually resort of brutal barbarism, incoherent decision-making, and savagery. Everything's going to shit, and Piggy is nowhere to be found. We need his specs to re-ignite the fires of national integrity.

I'll say it again...Moral majority, my ass.

Kerik Is The New Peterson, Y'all

You'd think ol' Bernie Kerik murdered his wife or something. Drudge has one of his splishy-splashy 'developing' stories at the top of his page right now (8:49 GMT). The headline?

KERIK LOVE NEST FACED GROUND ZERO PIT Tomorrow, we're to read that Kerik and Judith Regan had dirty, dirty sex in an apartment that was FACING GROUND ZERO. It was donated for use by exhausted police officers and volunteer rescue workers during the aftermath of the attack.

He's out. It's a no-go. Alberto Gonzalez didn't vet him like he was supposed to, and Bernie decided to drop out of contention. Big deal. It's not like there's anything else to talk about these days...

Meanwhile, over in Fraudulentelectionville, I'm slowly starting to believe that Ohio really is the true location of The Hellmouth.

Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio

• In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.

• In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers, and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse their lateness. "It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it being this bad."

You all know there's much, MUCH more. Read the article.

Oh yeah, Bev Harris, of BlackBoxVoting.org was finally reached by the people over at The Randi Rhodes Show, and she made me really nervous during her conversation with Randi. She was vague about where OUR money was going, and parts of it was just her babbling about IP addresses and source tags for voting machines. It was a messy, messy situation, and I don't know how to feel about it.

She could be telling the truth. She could be keeping quiet about the lawsuits she's been involved in regarding matters in Florida. ...or she could be using the money we all donated to further her documentarian career.

The people over at BBV have a statement up on the site right now, denouncing "certain message boards," and Keith Olbermann's claims that she's being uncooperative. Towards the end, they also made this little announcement:

The six-member Board of Directors of Black Box Voting has unanimously voted to terminate the employment of Associate Director Andy Stephenson, for:

- Repeatedly lying to various members of the board of directors

- Misrepresenting results of investigations

- Mishandling telephone communications and with holding information

- Temper tantrums and hanging up on members of the organization

- Outburst at the Florida Supervisor of Elections meeting, offending public officials

- Failing to assist, show up, or even call while Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris repeatedly reached him to request assistance when they were accosted by Volusia County police

Shameful, really. She's keeping quiet about everything else right now, you'd think she'd shut her mouth regarding the particulars of Mr. Stephenson. His sister just died...

Geez.

Tuesday Thunder

Bush handed out THREE Presidential Medals of Freedom Today!!!

Bush on Tommy Franks: He "led the forces that fought and won two wars in the defense of the world's security and helped liberate more than 50 million people from two of the worst tyrannies in the world."

Tommy Franks? He's the guy that kept publicly denying the fact that he was secretly drawing up plans for the Iraq war long before the U.S. invaded. He also denied the entire Tora Bora fiasco, even though he was the man in charge when bin Laden got away.

Bush on George Tenet: He was "one of the first to recognize and address the threat to America from radical networks," and after 9-11, he was "ready with a plan to strike back at al-Qaida and to topple the Taliban."

...and then, he resigned. He left to spend more time with his family. Right. Prior to that, he indulged in a bit of self-flaggelation for being responsible for the "16 words" that Bush said during his 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This is a guy that almost single-handedly made a joke out of the CIA by politicizing the very process by which intelligence is handled. Didn't he sit directly behind Colin Powell during his ridiculous presentation of evidence of WMD's to the UN Security Council back in February of 2003? The bastard!

Bush on L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer: "For 14 months Jerry Bremer worked day and night in difficult and dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to help its people rebuild and to establish a political process that would lead to justice and liberty."

Wasn't Bremer the guy that issued a slew of edicts for the interim Iraqi government immediately after the planned handover of political power? Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support. --By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Walter PincusWashington Post Foreign ServiceSunday, June 27, 2004

MANIC MONDAY!!!

John McCain says he has 'NO CONFIDENCE' in Rumsfeld. When asked if Rumsfeld was a liability to the Bush administration, McCain responded: "The president can decide that, not me." Pinochet is getting his, that bastard... Gen. Augusto Pinochet was indicted Monday for the kidnapping of nine dissidents and the killing of one of them during his 1973-90 regime, and the former dictator was placed under house arrest. It's Time to Stop Being Hit...a letter from Michael Moore You find other folks like yourself, 57 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you've learned, and that you aren't going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 57 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it's better than the abuse. Contact John Conyers over at the House Committee on the JudiciaryDemocratic Members! He could use the support in the Ohio recount case. It doesn't take long, folks. Oh yeah, Scott Peterson was sentenced to death. I will not provide a link because it'll be ALL OVER the news today, tomorrow, and next week. Damnit. Later this week: I'm writing a commentary/analysis of Peter Beinart's 'Fighting Faith' article in The New Republic, and David Sirota's 'Democrats Da Vinci Code' piece from The American Prospect. word.

Le Recount.

Time's running out. It's almost the middle of December. Here's this letter from Mark Crispin Miller, in its entirety.

The New York Times Ignores the Voting Problems

A SPECIAL BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS From Author and Professor Mark Crispin Miller Dear BuzzFlash Readers and Americans Concerned About the Preservation of Democracy: As you know (and way too many others don't), Rep. John Conyers recently held open hearings in the US Congress, on the all-important subject of the voting in Ohio on November 2nd. There was a lot of harrowing testimony on the tricks and tactics used there by Bush/Cheney to suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and to exaggerate Ohio's electoral support for the regime. It was a public inquiry of towering importance, and not only because it was (allegedly) Ohio that gave Bush just enough electoral votes to win. Ohio matters more than anyone can say, because what went down there went down not only in Ohio. There is in fact abundant evidence--strong evidence--suggesting that Team Bush pursued that crooked twofold strategy throughout the nation. In other words, they used a broad variety of means to trash the Kerry vote and to exaggerate the Bush vote, and did so everywhere they could. Now, this being a democratic republic (or so we've all been taught), you'd think that Conyers' charges -- and the hearing -- would get a lot of coverage in the press. And yet the New York Times, our nation's "newspaper of record," did not even mention it, much less cover it. The hearings were on Wednesday. There was no word of it in Thursday's paper, nor any word, belatedly, in Friday's. (Thursday's Times did run a couple of long stories on the electoral situation in Ukraine, but none on the quite similar, and -- to Americans -- vastly more important story here at home.) Such silence is bizarre. It's deeply wrong. In fact, it's un-American. For what public issue could there be that matters quite as much as the integrity of our elections? What, then, could possibly explain, or excuse, the Times' failure even to note Conyers' hearings? For that matter, what explains the Times' thorough indifference to this crucial subject? Like all American news outlets, the Times is obligated, by the First Amendment, to attempt to keep its readership informed about the government, so that the government is answerable to us, its ultimate custodians. Rather than deal squarely with the ever-mounting evidence of massive fraud by the Republicans, the Times instead has merely ridiculed those raising questions, as if such patriotic citizens were laughably insane. Soon after Election Day, several other US papers likewise tried to laugh off the innumerable glitches and anomalies that mainly favored the Republicans. For instance, the Baltimore Sun and Boston Globe at first derided the whole issue -- and then recanted, in effect, by running serious articles about the growing likelihood of systematic fraud. And yet the Times has never come around. Except for one stern editorial, our leading national daily has all but ignored the controversy raging everywhere; and as the Times has gone, of course, so has the TV news, which also downplayed the Conyers' hearings, or tuned them out entirely. (The hearings did run, uninterrupted, on C-SPAN.) Let's not let them get away with it. We should do all we can to get the Times' attention, so that it will cover this enormous story thoroughly, upfront and every day. Let them hear from you, right now. Contact them by phone, by fax, by email; by mail, or, if you're in New York, just drop in briefly to express your views about the paper's shocking irresponsibility. If you're a subscriber, do consider canceling that subscription--and be sure to tell them why. Let them know how much you care about American democracy, which they have put at risk, because they haven't done their job. Sincerely, Mark Crispin Miller

bits and pieces

Ann Coulter thinks liberals/democrats/progressives are racist. Some Coulter gems:

"I think, on the basis of the recent Supreme Court ruling that we can't execute the retarded, American journalists commit mass murder without facing the ultimate penalty," Ms. Coulter told me. "I think they are retarded. I'm trying to communicate to the American people and I have to work through a retarded person!" -A New York Observer interview with Coulter by George Gurley "Cheney is my ideal man. Because he's solid. He's funny. He's very handsome. He was a football player. People don't think about him as the glamour type because he's a serious person, he wears glasses, he's lost his hair. But he's a very handsome man. And you cannot imagine him losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there's a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it's one of our little methods of social control. We're supposed to fly off the handle. -A New York Observer interview with Coulter by George Gurley

"It's always so comforting when Muslims cite the precise verse from the Quran that tells them killing is wrong. Don't all empathetic human beings understand that instinctively? What if they lost their Quran that day and couldn't remember?" -9/11/02 My Name Is Adolf

"Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. So sorry they're angry - wait until they see American anger. Japanese kamikaze pilots hated us once too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons, and now they are gentle little lambs. That got their attention." -September 25, 2002. Why We Hate Them

"Muhammad makes L. Ron Hubbard look like Jesus Christ. Most people think nothing of assuming every Scientologist is a crackpot. Why should Islam be subject to presumption of respect because it's a religion?" -Sept. 4, 2002 Murder for Fun and Prophet

"I think it's unquestionable that Republicans are more likely to prevent the next attack. However, I will grant that John Kerry will improve the economy in the emergency services and body bag industry." -September 7th, 2004 Hannity and Colmes

R.I.P.

He died. Dimebag, of PANTERA fame. He's totally toast. Adios.

Bullshit, I say!

Beginning next year, the F.E.C. will institute new rules on the restricted uses of the Internet as it relates to political speech. As this addressed the Duncan Black issue, you can read the rebuttal over on Atrios' site.

Hey Hey, I'm slacking...

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters.

• Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.
  

DONALD RUMSFELD IS A DOUCHEBAG

• CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait - In a rare public airing of grievances, disgruntled soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment. "You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have."

The Future of the Democratic Party, by Howie Dean

• Let me tell you what my plan for this Party is: We're going to win in Mississippi...and Alabama...and Idaho...and South Carolina.
  

David Brooks, proud eugenics defender...

• In his December 7 New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks cited research by Steve Sailer -- a conservative who has written in defense of a group promoting eugenics -- in touting a purported "spiritual" movement of people he called "natalists." Brooks defined this demographic as people who are procreating more than other Americans, moving in droves to "clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children from bad influences," and leaving "what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger." They account for population increases in the fastest-growing regions in the country, Brooks suggested, and politicians will take notice. But his thesis is not supported by the data -- unless one limits the analysis, as Brooks apparently did, to one demographic, procreative white people.

OHIO VOTING IRREGULARITIES FORUM w/ John Conyers!

• Democratic Representatives Melvin Watt and Robert Scott will also be centrally involved with the hearing. Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in attendance, along with Ralph Neas (President, People for the American Way), Jon Greenbaum (Director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law), Ellie Smeal (Executive Director, The Feminist Majority), Bob Fitrakis ( The Free Press), Cliff Arnebeck (Arnebeck Associates), John Bonifaz (General Counsel, National Voting Institute), Steve Rosenfeld (Producer, Air America Radio), and Shawnta Walcott (Communications Director, Zogby International). Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been invited to attend.

more later.