Howard Stern is a Bastard

I've been pissed off about the theft of our airwaves, having been forever swapped for some beads and a stinky blanket from Australia. Not even a Mexican blanket.

So I've been looking forward to life after Howard Stern. I first heard him in ~1985 or 1986. It was as if I got into a party at the young neighbors' house, with my parents and all their friends actually having a conversation. And joking- people were laughing about stuff. And they were being silly the way my uncle was silly sometimes. A daily shot of the rare honest moment in company. You may have heard he's leaving FM radio.

I resent the notion I ought to pay to be on an advertising drip. Like we're in the nursing home, every one of us with a media outlet receiver is paying a tax and a monthly fee to lie in our filth and watch the contrived lives of others. I like a good sitcom, but since I don't watch Fox I can't watch the only good one. Don't remind me about cartoons. Since Fox owns a piece of the filthy Family Guy, I might not really be able to watch that. Waiting for a sign on that one.

But now there's satellite. And Stern's going. And he said there's a weekly serial Fartman coming. And I feel comfortable he and his writing staff are still sufficiently insulated from taste, but with a better pool of idiots. And I needed a new radio anyway.

Bastard.

Oxford, PA Council Members for Retirement

Per Open Secrets.Org, here is a sitting council member from my home town of Oxford:

WARE, JOHN H MR IV
OXFORD,PA 19363
RETIRED
1/13/2005
$2,000
Republican National Cmte

In Shreveport, LA, a Norman Kinsey has about $30K in to the thugs, with a wad coming from each company he 'works'.

We have a month to put these RNC pinheads out of 'work'.

Joe

George Will

For a long time, I've listened to Mr. Will, helf the time calling him an asshole. We won't agree on everything, but in principle I have to say I understand him. And that he's right better than half the time.

Now I'm at a loss. He said anyone supporting the Miers nomination to the Supreme Court is not Presidential material. I agree, and am surprised to hear Mr. Will supporting the argument I've been making all along: Bush is not presidential material.

Thanks George,
Joe

Below C Level

The infra-achieving President of the United States has brough mediocrity to a new low. With no standards for appointments whatsoever, he's relying simply on the carte blanche he's given by the GOP in the Congress to get his evil plans done.

And now he's appointing some fucking miscellaneous lawyer to the Supreme Court of the United States. It's no longer disinterest, his attitude has achieved obvious contempt.

After turning our fine nation into a Keystone Cops farce by sending the populations of several cities to the bottom of the ocean, and then several hundred miles north, then back, and then back north again, sending perishable trucked ice arriving in New Orleans to Maine for storage in a GOP-donor freezer (Americold or some shit), blowing thousands of gallons of now-precious fuel to keep the ice cold for the trip, after letting his asshole buddy Brownie stand up and blame others for his ignorant non-serious approach to sucking cash from the US public for whom the GOP has a nasty sanchez, it's time for us to blame ourselves for letting you vote for that piece of shit.

Coming soon: Pilleggi and Hershey voted for the ill-conceived PA government pay raise, and they have to be fired for it.

Joe

For the want of a nail

Two new nails in the coffin of our democracy are being driven right now by the Republican government. At stake is the independence of the states, and the freedom of individuals. The important question is this: Do we exist to support the state, or does the state exist to guarantee freedom and justice to individuals?

Pace Comitatus means the central government can't enforce its will in local law enforcement. It means the US government can't go to Boston to arrest people guilty of being gay and married.

DNA Database compulsory on arrest violates the fifth amendment's protection against compulsory testimony on behalf of the state, and violates the fourth amendment's prohibition of unreasonable search and siezure. But this time the item being siezed is the essence of the person being searched.

Strict construction my ass! WHich one of you assholes is voting Republican next time?

How to improve a fuel economy

A petroleum economy rapidly nearing cataplexy, the United States was last week the scene of a terrible scam. The government found a use for all those black people: Tell them that everyone along the gulf coast has to drive a hundred miles north.

At $4/gallon.

And maybe drive back (You'll have to rent a space to stay while you mop out the new swimming pool where your basement, heater, water heater, winter clothes, tools, packed-up memorobilia used to be. Now all that stuff is a blob. It would have taken about three days to pack it all up and ship it to your brother's house in New York for a few weeks. And it took weeks to arrive.) if the evacuation order is lifted. Can you stay in the city overnight? Luckily, everyone in Louisiana has one of those swamp boats, so you can still commute.

Guess 1 million trucks averaging 20 mpg. That's 5,000,000 gallons, about $20,000,000. And that's 5,000,000 gallons off the top of our national reserve. And back south makes 10,000,000 gallons.

Clinton would have had airlifts assembling DURING the storm.

But seriously, the Hurricanes

I was in New Orleans once, and it was around 2pm on a Tuesday. I was, oddly, the only one walking around without my very own hurricane. Everyone around me was steeped in the local lore, everybody knows the berms are there to keep reality out.

And we're going to rebuild it on its foundation. Under sea level. Because George Bush is in charge and nothing matters. Decisions are being made by political appointees with less success in their backgrounds than even the failure W.

Old-time religion, modernity, and sea level

Wow, can you imagine what it would have been like a hundred years ago, before doppler radar, satellite tracking and a National Hurricane Center? If a category 4 hurricane would have hit New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River?

For some reason, it would have been about the same, only with less damage, because George Bush is in charge and he is an asshole and his followers are unprepared, ill-thought out idiots.

One more today: The Accountability President

"One report was due April 1. The other was due in early summer. Neither report has been done," he said. Homeland Security officials were not immediately available to comment.

http://go.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=9601266

That was Tom Kean, Republican from NJ, former chair of the 9/11 panel, talking about the HS reports the HS president has so far failed to display, because his minions have failed to product them.

Talk about an arrogant p Rick!

He's too important to be approached except under the prescribed methods.
Got this email from Santorum's office:

Thank you for emailing me. I have detected, however, that your email message was not submitted through my website. Therefore, I am unable to process your email request. Please go to www.santorum.senate.gov and click on the "contact information" link and then select "Email Senator Santorum" at the bottom of the page. If you need further assistance, please feel free to contact my office at: 511 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510

Telephone: 202-224-6324

Thank you again for contacting me.

I looked at this 'poll' he has posted there, a finger in the wind:

Do you support a reasonable increase to minimum wage?

Yes:
45.3%
No:
54.7%


45827 total votes

Investigation, Please

Subject: Someone, please tell us what the government has been doing
Body: When the Bush gang defended themselves against accusations they ignored intelligence and that's why four airliners were hijacked on the morning of 9/11, there was something to it. Even though nobody could actually remember reading the memo called "Osama Bin Laden is goint to Hijack Planes and Fly Them into Things in the US," it was one memo and there are probably dozens of planes and targets in the US. It was nobody else's responsibility, but the President is very busy, in September of 2001 coming back from his month vacation by way of some campaign stops.
But this time, a storm the size of the Caribbean Sea hit three states, wiping a city off the map. It took weeks to get to the coast. I saw it every day on the weather channel. We knew to the minute when to expect landfall. And we've known a long time New Orleans is a death trap. So there was plenty of intelligence available, though maybe not in Crawford.

The President and everyone he knows knew the inlet to our country's fuel supply was right there. The Energy President certainly knew about the pipelines and tankers. The Senate knows this. Congress might even know.

In pre-election 2004 disaster money got to Florida BEFORE the hurricanes. How can we have an entire government- hundreds of professional public servants and their thousands of staff, let the manpower and defenses of this domestic territory be so misapplied? Why wasn't the National Guard mobilized? Why are they in Iraq taking care of Bush's other refugees?

I want an investigation of the Federal Government's response, and an audit of their responsibilites versus their activities over the past ten years, since the Republican Party hijacked our government. And I don't trust the Republican Party to take part in it.

Do we even know whether we understand how bad our condition may actually be? Eight trillion dollars. $8,000,000,000,000 dollars is the federal deficit. Can we trust their numbers? We certainly can't trust their words.

Joe Matthews

The Energy President

Seriously: The Energy President. That's how they billed his candidacy. The first Harvard MBA business executive, coming to execute some brass-tacks business and get this country moving again!

But the price of everything is about double what it was under Clinton. The Obscene Surplus under Clinton's fiscal authority has become nearly $8,000,000,000,000 in Obscene Deficit. The military hawk has failed for almost an entire term to complete a mission in Iraq, and persists in failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. And oil now trades at $70 a barrel- it was around $20 for most of my life. An Enronergy Bill got passed: overspent Bush's goal, failed to change anything but the rules for building a nuclear reactor (=stationary BOMB), rewarded the oil industry with an extra $1,000,000,000 in gifts to help them find oil so they can continue to rake in record margins. And I bet that since no one at Enron went to jail, they're right now trading petroleum futures. After they and Anderson bankrolled Bush's 2000 campaign.

And he's a war hawk. Real Defense type. Except his typical failure in the national security arena has spread to our energy security by doing nothing to protect the ports or pipelines.

And now that the hurricane has landed, and the president has no one to blame for it, expect the GOP appointees at the turnstiles to start spending money to make the problem prettier. Lipstick on a Pig.

So when will Cheney have the Obscene Hubris to sell us out again to Halliburton with a no-bid rebuilding contract?

Letter to our Government

I believe you've been pushing an agenda we're starting to see expressed in the calamitous poor response to Katrina. We're unrepresented. The minimalist approach to government works well when its inspiration is an interest in privacy and independent citizens. And the principle of taxing the fruit of American Opportunity is protective of the right to property.
But when it's used to redistribute our nation's wealth upward from lower to higher economic classes, the government simply turns the anti-altruistic Conservative peeve with taxation into a machine to install a new and opressive class system.

Other than that, I agree with PFAW's letter:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it is clear that Congress needs to take seriously the role of the federal government in meeting the needs of its people. I am urging you as my representative in Washington to:

1. Fund the health care, housing, nutrition, employment and education needs of the victims of Hurricane Katrina;

2. abandon all plans to extend or grant additional tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations; and

3. abandon the budget reconciliation plan to cut health care and nutrition programs for low-income families.

Yuck

Is anybody besides me nauseated at the Stalinist ceremonial protocol of doom thing they have going on down there, with Roberts carrying the coffin of Rehnquist?

A Pallbearer.

Yuck.

Bush, Florida, and the Republican Failure Machine

Well, at least they did nothing. Everything else they've touched has gone to hell.

This link takes you to an article written about our corporate Federal Government, and the way they look at doing their jobs: gather up all the talented, trained people they can find and ship them a thousand miles to train in a hotel banquet room in Atlanta for rescue work they'll complete In Louisiana and Alabama with colorful brochures and a Toll-Free Number you can call. The appointees here are stupid. The maniacs are running the circus. They have no phones. They have no water. (800) Call-FEMA: Your wait time is ...
...Press 8 if you fear your child's fever and diarrhea may be life-threatening, please consult your pediatrician when you GET THE FREAKIN' PHONES TURNED BACK ON.

http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000246.htm

I hope nothing serious happens in the domestic US requiring some manpower and skill until someone more responsible is president, and until the regime shows something different from the aggressive disregard this one has for us.

Our country has been run for over 20 years by leaders with contempt for government. They've slashed it, shrunk it, gotten rid of paperwork in it. But not until Bush came in with his retarded perspective on his perspective did they actually swell its ranks, maybe in part to absorb the ranks of the disenfranchised & outsourced. And the brochures and interagency falderal. Ineptitude at every level but electioneering, where the real skills are bending the rules, or breaking them under so many moving parts none can be seen as the casus belli. What happened to Valerie Plame?

How much money and free stuff have gone to Bush family members, companies and other non-citizen entities? What did you get? Easier wiretaps and narrower election rights. Protection for Cyanide and Mercury. Easier approval for nuke plants in your neighborhood, less property rights, and oh yeah- Nuclear Waste Cans on wheels bound for Yucca.

It's okay to be a Republican. Just stop doing all this evil bullshit until a purge can get your evil brood away from the tap. Just like, as Santorum says, "It's okay to be a gay, just no good to act like one."

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum might not be the biggest asshole on Capital Hill, but he is the only pure asshole on the Hill from Pennsylvania. I think Specter wants to do his part to make the world a better place, and wants to faithfully represent us Pennsylvanians.

And he might not be the biggest asshole on the Hill, but he wants to be. And he'll do or say whatever he has to for his wingnut party to elevate him to that position.

At last, there's a web site dedicated to outing him. You can't hold all his positions and remain rational. You can't hold all his positions and accept American Plurality. My German friend complained to me that the US is always waving the flag and shouting "USA!", but when a German expresses national pride, he is admonished. I explained that anyone can be an American. It's a universal term. Come here, be yourself, and 'poof!' you're American. I went on to remind him that the German state caused a bit of a hassle for the non-Germans by their chosen form of expression for their national pride. See, they wanted marginalization, even extermination for all non-aryans, non-heterosexuals and non-utilitarian artists. Hey- just like Rick!

I've believed for a long time that the people who express opinions like Ricky don't hold them. They express them for political gain. People care more when they're given a side to fight against than when they fight for something. Like liberty, justice and American plurality. That's what's made us the fine country we are: Pluralism.

Santorum, you fuckhead, here's a link to a site all about you and your gorgeous, immense, screwy head:
http://www.santorumexposed.com/

Things going badly

Our President, and most of government thank you very much, relies on your ignorance and lack of sophistication to further his goals. Always mentioning unrelated items together, always tacking hard to the extremes while dismissing critics, he simply has to be ignored now. We don't get anything from him or his people. I've said it before, the only information we get from this administration comes in the form of Lies.

Bush daftly reduces the arguments against his hog-fest in Iraq to 0 vs 1. A complete and immediate withdrawal or endlessly hosing US money and blood down the gullet of US companies floating on their bloated bellies in the Caribbean. He thinks you're an idiot. His spin machine claimed a week of victories as Congress lifted our wallets as they rushed out the door to vacation on the dole, even though every vote exceeded or fell short of his dictats.

Oh- unrelated War in Iraq juxtaposes nicely with War on Terror, because it is assumed you interpret those both to mean "War on the Towelhead Motherfuckers". Of course there's a difference: The War In Iraq ended over a year ago, and the War on Terror isn't a real war (with objectives and maps and stuff). Bush has no plan but domestic stalemate, which is all a war against an -ism can be. But we got up and left after the middle of the real war we had in Afghanistan- oh, and it's still going. And we still have troops there. Spinning wheels.

What would happen to our international position if we withdrew 100% by next Tuesday? Nothing bad, except we wouldn't have room for all the returning soldiers. Bases closing, VA hospitals shrinking, no jobs. The contractors would come home and go on unemployment, assuming Halliburton et al pay into the UC system. The real danger is what would happen domestically if 200,000 people came home with no jobs outside Homeland Security. Bush the CEO knows that we will look weaker on paper when our annual report is published if we bring all those folks home. His refusal to pick a goal and place it on a calendar has more to do with padding our bond value than anything else. You simply can't believe what he says, so you have to look for the truth in the unpublished back story.

SO: what to do in Iraq? Shouldn't be doing anything anywhere near Iraq at this point. What's going on there anyway? Spinning wheels: Spin the Wheel of IED's- whose number gonna come up?

Remember Afghanistan? An election doesn't a democracy make. A Constitution in Iraq won't come but by dictation from over here. Sunnis want a Sunni/Baath state. Shiites want Sharia. Kurds want Kurdistan. Irreconcilable. So as a parting gift, Bush is putting another hole in the NATO boat by fomenting Civil War in Iraq. Syria and Turkey can't have domestic separatists looking over the border at a free Kurdistan, but that's what we'll force them to do.

How much more permanent damage are we going to tolerate from this chump and his glutton horde? I say screw Iraq. Get the hell out. Stop killing our young people, Mr. Bush, and stop taking our money, Mr. Cheney. Stop lying, Mr. Wolfowitz. Stop pretending to work Mrs. Rice. Stop picking fights, shorty Rumsfeld. I want a stalemate. Lame duck begins now. No on Roberts. No on everything this asshole wants, and no on everything his supporters dream they want.

A bipartisan resolution in Congress, the Homeward Bound Act (H.J. Res. 55), calls for a plan in Iraq with a timeline. We need to increase the number of co-sponsors before Congress returns in September. Please call Rep. Pitts today and ask him to sign on.

Congressman Joseph Pitts Phone: 202-225-2411

fdaFDA Approval is Meaningless

Politicians, drug salesman and stockholders are always bitching about jury awards and trying to limit patients' rights to sue companies for killing them. The recent Vioxx verdict will be used as an example on FOX for a few months, to show how out-of-control juries are.

I agree that juries are made up of dumber people than we want to find. They know nothing about the case they're given to decide, which in the case of drugs and health is unforgivable. I heard one of the jury members say, "It looked like Merck tried to do the best they could, until the memos surfaced about tweaking the studies." The defense attorney said "Look- this is an FDA-approved drug!"

But in order to grant FDA approval, the FDA only requires the company to provide data to justify it. Lots of data. Lots of studies. To win FDA approval, Merck held some studies in the dark. Kept them quiet. Like the studies that showed increased suicide in antidepressant trials. And since the drug companies are the only parties to the drug sale represented in the Cabinet, the Congress and the lobbies, they can and do.

The ChiIndy Sheehan Thing

MoveOn sent an email this morning about the vigils around the country. We're all with her, right? But let's be clear about something:
A trip to Iraq is not a death sentence. There are a lot of our people over there. I guess we can't count the mercenaries/contractors. Only some are dead.

The personal notes in the email suggested horrible fears that loved ones slated to go away for a while will come to bodily harm. But of course they will! They're in the military, which gets involved with bodily harm as a workplace likelihood.

It's important that we look for a positive ingredient in this shit soup, if only to do a better job than the administration in honoring the fallen and maimed. Bush wants them coming home in the dark so no one notices. I want us all to think about them, and never forget the way life changes for someone when the shrapnel from an IED costs a leg, arm or penis. Life-changing. Like when Bush stopped snorting coke and falling down drunk to be a Jesus freak working for Armageddon.

I think you should remember the part of protest that transcends your personal situation and interest: This is a waste of your loved ones' time and misappropriation of their talent in addition to a hasty risk of their life, limbs, independence. Not because it's a money-making diversion to liberate Iraq, or because it has no bearing on our security, or even because the whole fiasco was built on a lie. It's a waste of time because our spoiled and indolent leadership, indifferent to our interests and above the fray, only visit us on TV from time to time to pat each other on the back, reinforce our fears, and change the subject from their lack of a plan (NOW DOCUMENTED: They knew they had insufficient planning!) and lack of a goal and lack of a reason and lack of talent. Their distraction in Iraq diverts valuable assets from our real offensive projects to the prosecution of the war, which ended over a year ago when the President landed on the aircraft carrier in his Buck Rogers pajamas.

He went us there because he could. He saw an opportunity, although it had to be spelled out in decades of Neocon writing. Politics is the art of the possible, and Bush had the domestic political capital to get away with it. The GOP will spin responsibility away from themselves, but his friends are getting filthy rich, just like his buddies at Enron did when they figured out a scam. But if Enron had Halliburton and the other military contractors subcontracted, California would be their property today.

Iraq: only a few thousand miles away from our enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea... Canada.

The Separation of State and State. Wha?

1) Here's a link. Thanks Rich. It fits into the thing I wanted to write today:
http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=318

2) We've been watching televisions tell us about the growing disparity between the haves and have-mores, and once in a while we hear about the have-nots. But while we're running as fast as we can to turn the wheel and keep our stuff while we go out and get more (at near-zero-margin prices!), we're missing something important.

The government again. Still. Nobody on the hill except that coward veteran Kerry or that adopter of black kids McCain ever served in the military. None of their kids are going off to fight the war. Very few have ever had real jobs, although Frist opened old peoples' chests to vacuum money out, and DeLay was a destroyer of insects.

And the median income for a family of four is dropping. And the CPI is rising. And they voted themselves another pay raise. I haven't seen whether the Presidential salary was raised as well, but when Bush came in 2001 he accepted a $400,000 a year salary plus expenses and benefits including LIFETIME BODYfreakinGUARDS. For those who skipped that class, he made 40% more than Clinton the previous year ($250,000).

And in Pennsylvania, watching as jobs evaporate and population ages and flees for younger cities, with tax revenue declining and slot machines promising to make up the difference between what the politicians can promise in 30 seconds and what reality can provide, the lawmakers just passed around pay raises of over 10%. As health programs and municipal services are being whittled down to empty slogans.

So back to the link. Unbossed is a site apparently dedicated to freedom on the roads. But the roads are ultimately paid for and maintained by bodies. And when a company gets a deal to build a toll road they might be taking a share of the tolls.

Our local, county, state and federal governments are out making deals to get themselves paid hard, and we're paying them for it. I'm not a Democrat, but I plan to vote that way until the Republicans act like people living among people. I wanted to work to promote a third party, like the Greens, but I think taking over the Democratic Party with Progressives interested in the people who live here is a nobler goal.

So let's purge the governments of everyone in them, replace them with naive people who don't trust lobbyists and can't try to control their neighbors' attitudes, want to leave personal decicions to the Americans, and hope to get back to their real jobs after a little time off to serve the people. Let's.