What could possibly go wrong?

Curry's newest campaign poster?

 The Onion has nothing on the real news any more (via Nashville Scene):

Rep. Curry Todd, the champion of Tennessee's guns-in-bars law, was jailed last night and charged with drunken driving and possession of a handgun while under the influence.Todd, R-Collierville, was stopped in his GMC Envoy at around 11:15 last night near Hillsboro Village. He was going 60 mph in a 40 mph zone and swerving in and out of his lane, police say. He failed a roadside sobriety test and refused to take a breathalyzer. Police say they detected a strong odor of alcohol on the legislator and found a loaded Smith & Wesson 38 Special in a holster in his car. 

A police affidavit says Todd was unsteady on his feet, "almost falling down at times," his speech was slurred and he had watery and bloodshot eyes. Todd was "obviously very impaired and not in any condition to be carrying a loaded handgun," police say. 

Possession of a weapon while under the influence is a Class A misdemeanor and carries a sentence of up to one year and a $2,500 fine. Todd had a handgun carry permit. That could be suspended for up to three years. 

At the website forum of the Tennessee Firearms Association, one of the main groups that lobbied for guns-in-bars, members have been understandably quiet so far today. But someone did post, "THANKS CURRY FOR THE BAD PUBLICITY." 

We can only assume Todd, 63, had been drinking in a restaurant or bar. Did he bring his handgun with him? Drinking with your gun—that's something the lawmaker told us repeatedly during the guns-in-bars debate that no responsible handgun owner ever would do. In fact, it's prohibited under the guns-in-bars law. According to Todd, that law was only to let law-abiding (sober) citizens carry their licensed weapons into family restaurants to protect all the patrons against any would-be robbers or other armed assailants.

Yeah, this is a huge surprise! Even given the unlikely scenario of a robber in a restaurant, how safe would you feel with a drunken idiot like Curry blasting away to "protect" the place?

This should be required viewing for anyone concerned about our economy:

The program from Bill Moyers which is here is incredibly important and well worth watching. His guest, William Black, is introduced by Moyers:

The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course.

Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."

Black makes some vitally important points in the course of the interview:

BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.

(Snip)

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."

This is a ringing indictment of the perpetrators of the crisis we currently face, and the people who are still trying to cover it up:

BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, 'contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.

BILL MOYERS: The cover up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.

BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed,...

There's much much more in this piece, and it may be one of the clearest and most important analysises of how we got where we are today, and what we need to do to get out of it. If you see nothing else about the economic crisis this week, SEE THIS!

All men are created equal?

(Via Rueters)

NEW YORK, Jan 8 (Reuters) - A search of accused swindler Bernard Madoff's office desk revealed he had signed checks totaling more than $173 million ready to be sent, U.S. prosecutors said in court papers on Thursday asking a judge to jail him.

The government's written brief said the checks were discovered by investigators after his arrest and charge on Dec. 11 and showed the 70-year-old investment adviser tried to move money before his alleged ponzi scheme became known to authorities.

(SNIP)

Madoff is under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance at his luxury Manhattan apartment after authorities said he confessed to a $50 billion ponzi scheme over many years and charged him with securities fraud last month.

Madoff (sweet irony in that name) bilks hundreds out of billions, and he's under house arrest. A kid in Oakland gets in a fight on BART and he gets shot and killed.. What's wrong with this picture?

Edit, 1:17 pm: boy, that staying positive idea is going to be harder than I thought!!!

Another arguement in favor of class warfare

(Via Newscloud)

Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.

Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.

"Less than a week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation," Waxman said. "We will ask whether any of this makes sense. "

The committee will ask the company's executives about their multimillion-dollar pay packages -- some of which they continue to receive -- as well as who bears responsibility for the company's high-risk investment portfolio, which led to its near collapse just weeks ago.

"They were getting their manicures, their pedicures, massages, their facials while the American people were paying their bills," thundered Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), of the executive retreat at the Monarch Resort.

Are these guys really so deaf to the outrage that the bailout has caused that they thought such an extravagant get away was okay? Or do they just not give a flying fuck?

AIG lost over $5 billion in the last quarter of 2007 due its risky financial products division, Waxman said. Yet in March 2008, when the company's compensation committee met to award bonuses, Chief Executive Martin Sullivan urged the committee to ignore those losses, which should have slashed bonuses.

But the board agreed to ignore the losses from the financial products division and gave Sullivan a cash bonus of over $5 million. The board also approved a new compensation contract for Sullivan that gave him a golden parachute of $15 million, Waxman said.

At what point are the people in these companies, who sucked down these huge bonuses on top of inflated salaries, going to be held accountable? Or is it enough to shovel the risk to the American people while they get their nails done? Seriously, the revolutionaries in Franch started lopping off the aristocrat's heads for such blind extravagance . . . .

700 billion fluffy nothings

Staggering bailouts? Body counts? Global warming stats? They're just numbers, silly

(Via Mark Morford)

(No excerpts this time. This is all too good!)

Relax, people, it's just a number.

It's just a bunch of zeroes. It's merely 700,000,000,000, and if you look closely and blur your eyes just right and then hit yourself in the face with a brick, you'll soon see that each and every one of those cute little circles is filled with goodness and candy and the sweet sighs of puppies and pie.

Really, what could such a ginormous number possibly mean to everyday hard-workin' plebes like you and me? What does all that wild speculation about imminent recessions and the total collapse of the U.S. economy and "the end of Wall Street" actually mean for us all on a day-to-day basis? In a word, nothing. In five more: happy safe terrorist-free nothing. After all, "the fundamentals of our economy are sound." And besides, we're all just "a nation of whiners." There now. Better?

Don't you already know? If eight miserable years of Bush have taught us anything, it's that numbers like these don't actually mean anything, or have any real effect or significance, be they astronomical bailouts, soldier body counts, the costs of a lost war, evidence of global warming, insane oil profits, you name it.

This is what you must remember: When you see all kinds of frightening data flit across the screen, when you hear all sorts of dour forecasts and prognostications and when you're hammered by endlessly grim pie charts and downward-pointing arrows and scowling rich white men sitting before congressional panels, well, just remember you are simply in the realm of the gods, that the swirl of terrifying numbers is merely how they rearrange the furniture up there on Mount Olympus.

In other words, it has absolutely nothing to do with your hopes and dreams or future tax bills or the price of a double latte at Dunkin' Donuts. OK, it actually does -- disastrously so -- but it's best not to think about it too much. Fair enough?

I know, it's tough not to feel a little shaken, unnerved, openly disgusted. A $700 billion bailout of a Bush-gutted economy by an already nearly bankrupt U.S. Treasury? Two trillion for a failed war in Iraq? Ten trillion in national debt and a $480 billion budget deficit (not counting the $700B for the bailout and it could be much more) and a record trade deficit, with all those numbers nearly double (if not far more) of what they were in 2001? Why, you'd almost think someone -- or maybe an entire administration, perhaps the most irresponsible in modern U.S. history -- was largely to blame. But they're not! Because they're just numbers!

Like these: 47 million Americans without health insurance (up 30 percent from eight years ago). The U.S. dollar now worth roughly half of its 2001 value. More than 150 signing statements challenging over 1,100 provisions of federal law from a president who could give a flying constitutional crap for legal precedent. Oh, and yes: 4,170 dead U.S. soldiers (so far), 100,000 brain damaged and wounded, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. But again, who's counting? Not Bush or McCain, that's for sure. So why should you?

Remember this, citizen: Numbers are intangibles, totally inconsequential, wispy insubstantial things to be fawned over by liberal scientists and math geeks and tax accountants and people who care about, you know, stuff. As such, when those numbers turn really dark and frightening and dangerous to the stability of your job and your life and your future, well, we can't really hold anyone accountable.

Certainly not Bush and his cronies, who've handed every tax break, gutted old law, nefarious new law and contorted FDA/EPA regulation over to Big Energy and the military suppliers and the same cretinous Wall Street players who mangled your money in the first place. Certainly not crusty, untouchable Alan Greenspan, now deemed to be the master architect of this collapse, whom John McCain once worshipped like a god.

And certainly not those greedy Wall Street cretins themselves, many of whom knowingly manipulated a flawed system and floated trillions in worthless paper so as to better make their boat payments. Who cares if that paper had little pictures of your kids' futures on them? Personal note from Wall Street bankers: F--k you for caring.

(By the way, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested, it's probably best not to threaten all those Wall Street CEOs and upper-tier execs with yanking their multimillion-dollar golden parachutes, because they might balk and choose not to participate in the riskiest bailout in U.S. history. Don't forget the golden rule, abused citizen: The gods always win.)

Wait, what the hell do you think you're doing, staring in justifiable panic as your stock portfolio and your 401K and your nice, sturdy bank's own valuation shudder and slip by 10, 20, 40 percent in the space of a week, or maybe collapses altogether? What are you doing, suddenly discovering your home is worth a fraction of what it was or that you can't really afford to send your kids to college anymore or that you can't get a loan for your small business and your credit rating is suddenly meaningless? Get away from the screen, citizen. Remember: It's just numbers. This isn't about you, whiner.

Here's a fun number: Nearly $40 billion in profit for Exxon in 2006, the biggest of any U.S. company, ever. By the way, the price of a barrel of oil just jumped its highest amount in history -- $25 in a single day -- thanks to all the violent instability in the U.S. market. Turns out, given the bizarre machinations of How It's All Set Up, the energy markets are loving this meltdown, and Bush's oil cronies (among others) are getting richer than ever. Go figure.

It just keeps going. The Dow, for the first time in history, moved more than 350 points four days in a row. The value of the U.S. dollar just sank even lower, which now means a cup of coffee in Paris will cost the average American about $147. And what about the $600 billion Congress is about to rubber-stamp for Pentagon spending and Homeland Security? Best not to think about it. They pray you don't.

Here's an idea: Maybe we can force all the oil companies to bail out the U.S. economy, given how, thanks to Bush administration's unchecked rapaciousness and Dick Cheney's oily sneer, their total profits for this year will likely outstrip the combined value of the "war" on drugs, terrorism, God, country, megachurch DVDs, and your children's children's future. You think?

I know, it's all a bit confusing for the everyday plebe, all these massive sums and baffling lexicons of financial jargon and sullen overlords of finance and government slapping each other around like nervous children. Best you don't pay too much attention. Best you don't ponder too deeply much how all those numbers intertwine and feed into and off of each other.

And best you don't contemplate the biggest number of all, the one that sums up the overall odds that you, the average wary Bush-ravaged tax-paying American, will emerge largely unscathed from this historic debacle.

That number? Oh, about one in a million.

We are becoming the monsters we are scared of:

(Via The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The moral midgets who came up with this new use for "recycling" should have to was a war crimes tribunal. Our country's soul is at stake here, and BushCo is selling it to the devil.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

Well, not every "American" apparently, because some of them approved the use of these methods. To quote a famous pundit from another age:

New Orleans Just Keeps Getting Fucked:

(Via truthout)

New Orleans, Louisiana - FEMA gave away about $85 million in household goods meant for Hurricane Katrina victims, a CNN investigation has found.

The material - from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities - sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year.

James McIntyre, FEMA's acting press secretary, told CNN that FEMA was spending more than $1 million a year to store the material and that another agency wanted the warehouses torn down, so "we needed to vacate them."

"Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA's needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA's inventory," McIntyre wrote in an e-mail.

He declined a request for an on-camera interview, telling CNN the giveaway was "not news."

Yeah, well I bet the people who have yet to return home in New Orleans might consider it news.

FEMA said some of the items were donations from companies after Katrina, but most were purchased in the field as "starter kits" for people living in trailers provided by the agency. And even though the stocks were offered to state agencies after FEMA decided to get rid of them, one of the states that passed was Louisiana.

This is utterly typical of how BushCo handles anything to do with people who are outside their strata. And government money was spent on a lot of this, just to basically give it away.

Fuck 'em. The people in this administration are maggots who should be facing criminal charges.

Quote for the Day (Implied Implication Division)

I have to believe that [American citizens] would find it completely implausible that this amount of email would just disappear by accident. And I mean to imply what I'm implying - Rep. John Sarbanes

(During a hearing on possible violations of the Presidential Records Act in February, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Congressman Sarbanes (D-Maryland) implied the email archiving system had been intentionally destroyed by the Bush administration to allow White House staff to cover their tracks and erase evidence of wrongdoing.)

Oh, and those emails? Yes, they are gone, apparently. How convenient . . .

Quote for the Day (Former President Division)

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. - Richard M. Nixon

All the sex scandal stuff:

All in all, I think I'd rather have someone in office who is getting laid than someone who is not.

Happy Hallowee . . . . Ooooppss!

"Offensive? Oh, you folks are just too P.C.!"

(Via ABC News)

A top immigration official has apologized after awarding "most original costume" to a Homeland Security Department employee who dressed in prison stripes, dreadlocks and dark makeup for a Halloween gathering at the agency.

Julie Myers, assistant secretary overseeing Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, was part of a three-judge panel that lauded the costume, worn by a white employee, last Wednesday. She also posed for a photo with him.

(SNIP)

The employee who wore the costume was not identified, but ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said he was counseled by his supervisor. He was not wearing blackface but makeup that was a darker color than his skin, Nantel said.

Myers and others who saw him could not tell he was wearing makeup, Nantel said, and they learned he wore makeup when some employees complained later that day.

". . . could not tell he was wearing makeup . . . ."? Maybe we don't have to worry about racial profiling if that's how observant these twits are. It says a lot about the attitude towards race that these folks have in their off hours (and probably carry with them into their jobs) that this person wasn't sent home immediately when he showed up for work dressed in this costume, but instead got a prize in the costume contest!

Maybe if one of the folks had showed up in a KKK costume he could have lynched the Rasta guy and gotten first prize!

Poetic justice

This, via Tom Tomorrow:

Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.

Story.

*Name for phenomenon suggested by reader S.T.:

Perhaps espousing anti-gay positions while secretly craving homosexual love should enter the lexicon as “having a wide stance”.

Besides being a highly quoted Craig line, it can be taken to mean your public stance is way wide of your private stance, as it were.

It certainly , besides being sort of poetic, has more of a chance of being used than "fucking lying assholes".

We won't have Gonzo to kick around anymore

My picture finally came true!!! I swear, all the train wrecks in this administration happen in slow motion.

Anyone giving odds on whether Gonzo will face true legal consequences for his many crimes? Is the statute of limitations on perjury reached when the door hits the resigner in the ass? He could still be impeached, ya know . . . .

A message for the 4th

(Via Truthout)

Keith Olbermann:

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the "referee" of Prosecutor Fitzgerald's analogy. These are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush - and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal - the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It's the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one - and it stinks. And they know it.

See the whole thing. It's a manifesto, a broadside. And god help us all if the actions Bush has taken don't result in him losing the office he has so awfully defiled. If we do not rise up in outrage, we deserve these assholes.

Scooter Scoots

It's not really a big surprise that Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence---the biggest surprise may be that it took him so long to get to it---but is it a miscarriage of justice, a overstepping of his bounds, a blatantly biased political decision? Well, of course! As Bob Cesca said in the Huffington Post:

No, the president's decision had everything to do with: 1) a likely deal between the vice president and Libby's attorneys in which Libby promised to keep the scuttlebutt away from Vice President Cheney in exchange for the VPOTUS promising to see what he could do about the sentence; and 2) Scooter Libby isn't poor, black or retarded.

That's it.

If Scooter Libby had been some unfortunate nobody who was either black or poor or retarded or WHOOPS!, all three, the president would've merely skimmed the Gonzo Notes and remarked, "He's a retarded and his first name is 'I. Lewis Scooter'? Deny. ACK! I swallowed another coin."

Sadly and seriously, in the president's universe -- shared by his thinning brigade of dittoheads (see above blog comments) -- the excessive punishments are reserved exclusively for people like Terry Washington: a man who lacked the ability to control his actions and communicate at a normal level; a man who was unable to comprehend what was going on around him. In other words, a man who was clearly more competent than the president.

Paul Begala also comments there:

Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker -- and then laugh about it. Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial -- and then snicker when asked about it in a debate. Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband -- after he abused her. A friend of mine at the time asked Bush to commute her sentence, telling him, "Betty Lou ain't a threat to no one she ain't married to." No dice.

Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.

But if you're rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.

This is not the America we had when Bush started his nightmare run as chief executive. It is an America where the people George Bush identifies with and understands, the rich, privileged, and Republican, get the breaks. Everyone else gets broken.

Quote for the Day (Idiot Bastard Son Division)

(Via Think Progress)

“If they f*ck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to f*ck them too.” — World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s comments according to a new special bank panel report, which concluded that Wolfowitz’s actions have “had a dramatic negative effect on the reputation and credibility” of the bank.

Ramble on:

"Here's the latest on American Idol! Get this ready for page one!"

One of the things I have always tried to keep myself from doing with this blog is feeling guilty if I don't post something everyday . . . or every other day, if you will. Sometimes I'm just too busy, and sometimes I just don't have anything to say. So if there are gaps, that's the way it goes.

Lately, I have to say, it's been almost a case of sensory overload. I mean by the time I get a handle on one thing in the news, there's another scandal astheBushCo crowd melts down. It's a real horror show, and I am not sure I have much to add to the commotion, as blogs like Atrios or Crooks and Liars document the atrocities so much better than I possibly could.

But one thing I really am pissed about---one thing that really frosts my cake, as it were---is how utterly incompetent and gutless the main stream media has been throughout this debacle. It's not like there's a lack of things to write about, or even a real need to do a ton of investigating. You can practically stumble over a new potential story just by being conscious. But there seems to be an utter cluelessness within the media about how to actually report news that is very sad, and given the supposed role a free press should be playing in this "democracy", pretty tragic.

There are some stirrings from the gaggle of eunuchs in the White House press room lately, but where's the real follow up? Where's the sense that any of these dolts care as much about getting the truth of any story out as much as they care about how they personally look to their colleagues and the powers that be in this country who they should be questioning? Where's the sense of duty to the American public?

It's a farce.

Remembering the days of Watergate, when journalists actually seemed to stand for something other than the corporate masters and the power brokers they rubbed elbows with at inside the Beltway cocktail parties, I have to wonder if that was just some huge accident. Even Bob Woodward, half of the team who broke that story, kissed Bush's ass to get a best seller that was little more that a puff piece for Bush and his cronies.

Today, I get most of my news from the internet and TV comedy shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Bill Maher displays more guts than any dozen MSM press release copiers. The unasked questions that lie on the floor of the press rooms of this country are where the real news is, not in the insipid articles and tepid commentaries that pass for journalism nowadays. There are exceptions, like Seymour Hersh and Keith Olbermann, but they are about as rare as hairs on a frog's back.

So there's my rant for today. without good information, you can't have an informed electorate. and the pablum and horseshit that passes for news in most of the media today is not going to inform anyone. The cause of Anna Nicole Smith's son's death or why Wynonna's marriage fell apart don't mean shit to me. If I were prone to believing conspiracies, I might think it was a plot to keep us from seeing the real truth. but that couldn't be.

Could it?

It's all a plot!!!

(Via American Progress)

What's that stench?

It's hard to keep up with all the scandals coming out of the Bush administration lately, but it sure makes Watergate seems quaint and old fashioned.

The bets are on that Alberto Gonzales is gone Friday night. After the Saturday papers are put to bed. Any takers?

Yeah, things are fucked up. Now what?

So much has been going on lately---Coulter redefining "fag" (the Rev. Fred Phelps epitaph) as a harmless school yard taunt, Libby Libby Libby is guilty guilty guilty, Walter Reed in scandal, etc.---that it's hard to know where to begin or what to say. Perhaps the hardest thing is not to wind up on the sidelines bemoaning the state of the world while it burns to the ground. How not to get mired in criticism and negativity without balancing the picture with hope and positivity?

I am not sure. Sometimes it seems impossible not to become a dour curmudgeon, screaming "I told you so" to a crowd that gets increasing tired of that kind of attitude. But what is the alternative? At times focusing on the advances in one's own life seems to be the only way to keep from being sucked into the negative vortex. Making the best out of the little things; things which add up to my life, and that's pretty big.

I don't know that I have answers, but I do have a lot of questions. Wringing my hands over the way things have gone in this country is using up a lot of energy, and isn't there some other way to use that energy? I'm just thinking out loud here. any ideas?