July 31, 2006

CSNY Freedom Of Speech Tour 2006




"We Have All Been Here Before...(only our harmonies were a lot better)"

Can't We Send Them All?

Republican Rep. Jonathan Paton, a freshman legislator, said he learned Saturday that he was going to Iraq to work in military intelligence for five to six months.

He will also miss the primary and general elections, and likely would be absent for the a few weeks of the 2007 legislative session.

The 35-year-old Tucson native said he volunteered for the duty last year because he needed to back up his support of the war with action. "You should kind of put your money where your mouth is," he said.
So, what about these other Republicans?
* Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay - avoided the draft, did not serve.
"So many minority youths had volunteered ... that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself."
* House Majority Whip Roy Blunt - did not serve
* Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist - did not serve.
* Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-KY - did not serve.
* Rick Santorum, R-PA, third ranking Republican in the Senate - did not serve.
* George Felix Allen, Republican Senator from Virginia - a supporter of Nixon and the Vietnam war, did not serve.
* Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* GW Bush - decided that a six-year Nat'l Guard commitment really means four years. Still says that he's "been to war." Huh?
* VP Cheney - several deferments, the last by marriage (in his own words, "had other priorities than military service")
* Former Att'y Gen. John Ashcroft - did not serve; received seven deferment to teach business ed at SW Missouri State
* Jeb Bush, Florida Governor - did not serve.
* Karl Rove - avoided the draft, did not serve, too busy being a Republican.
* Former Speaker Newt Gingrich - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* Former President Ronald Reagan - due to poor eyesight, served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing.
* "B-1" Bob Dornan - avoided Korean War combat duty by enrolling in college acting classes. Enlisted only after the fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm - avoided the draft, did not serve, four student deferments.
And they're just the tip of the chickenhawk iceberg (courtesy of awolbush.com).

July 30, 2006

"Deck Chairs on the Titanic"


The New York Times thinks you should pay extra to read this Op-Ed by Frank Rich. I think everybody should read this, especially those who cannot afford to (since it's more than likely that it's their kids who are being used like deck chairs to fight the war in Iraq). So here it is for free. Read it and weep. Weep for our soldiers. Weep for the Iraqis. Weep for our country. Weep for the world.

Shock & Awe
The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq

By FRANK RICH

AS America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle’s gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don’t know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It’s a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration’s initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam’s mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We’ve been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But it’s the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war’s architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.

The Bush administration constantly congratulates itself for liberating Iraq from Saddam’s genocidal regime. But regime change was never billed as a primary motivation for the war; the White House instead appealed to American fears and narcissism — we had to be saved from Saddam’s W.M.D. From “Shock and Awe” on, the fate of Iraqis was an afterthought. They would greet our troops with flowers and go about their business.

Donald Rumsfeld boasted that “the care” and “the humanity” that went into our precision assaults on military targets would minimize any civilian deaths. Such casualties were merely “collateral damage,” unworthy of quantification. “We don’t do body counts,” said Gen. Tommy Franks. President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly — with an estimate of 30,000 — some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.) By then, Americans had tuned out.

The contempt our government showed for Iraqis was not just to be found in our cavalier stance toward their casualties, or in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There was a cultural condescension toward the Iraqi people from the get-go as well, as if they were schoolchildren in a compassionate-conservatism campaign ad. This attitude was epitomized by Mr. Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens” response to the looting of Baghdad at the dawn of the American occupation. In “Fiasco,” his stunning new book about the American failure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, captures the meaning of that pivotal moment perfectly: “The message sent to Iraqis was far more troubling than Americans understood. It was that the U.S. government didn’t care — or, even more troubling for the future security of Iraq, that it did care but was incapable of acting effectively.”

As it turned out, it was the worst of both worlds: we didn’t care, and we were incapable of acting effectively. Nowhere is this seen more explicitly than in the subsequent American failure to follow through on our promise to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure we helped to smash. “There’s some little part of my brain that simply doesn’t understand how the most powerful country on earth just can’t get electricity back in Baghdad,” said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile and prominent proponent of the war, in a recent Washington Post interview.

The simple answer is that the war planners didn’t care enough to provide the number of troops needed to secure the country so that reconstruction could proceed. The coalition authority isolated in its Green Zone bubble didn’t care enough to police the cronyism and corruption that squandered billions of dollars on abandoned projects. The latest monument to this humanitarian disaster was reported by James Glanz of The New York Times on Friday: a high-tech children’s hospital planned for Basra, repeatedly publicized by Laura Bush and Condi Rice, is now in serious jeopardy because of cost overruns and delays.

This history can’t be undone; there’s neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished. The Iraqi people, whose collateral damage was so successfully hidden for so long by the Rumsfeld war plan, remain a sentimental abstraction to most Americans. Whether they are seen in agony after another Baghdad bombing or waving their inked fingers after an election or being used as props to frame Mrs. Bush during the State of the Union address, they have little more specificity than movie extras. Chalabi, Allawi, Jaafari, Maliki come and go, all graced with the same indistinguishable praise from the American president, all blurring into an endless loop of instability and crisis. We feel badly ... and change the channel.

Given that the violence in Iraq has only increased in the weeks since the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist portrayed by the White House as the fount of Iraqi troubles, any Americans still paying attention to the war must now confront the reality that the administration is desperately trying to hide. “The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists,” President Bush said in December when branding Zarqawi Public Enemy No. 1. But Iraq’s exploding sectarian warfare cannot be pinned on Al Qaeda or Baathist dead-enders.

The most dangerous figure in Iraq, the home-grown radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is an acolyte of neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam but an ally of Iran who has sworn solidarity to both Hezbollah and Hamas. He commands more than 30 seats in Mr. Maliki’s governing coalition in Parliament and 5 cabinet positions. He is also linked to death squads that have slaughtered Iraqis and Americans with impunity since the April 2004 uprising that killed, among others, Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey. Since then, Mr. Sadr’s power has only grown, enabled by Iraqi “democracy.”

That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad’s civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?

Yep, Mel. Your Life IS F*cked



Here are the highlights of Mel Gibson's most recent run-in with the law:
...(Gibson) spouted anti-Semitic remarks, addressed a female deputy as "sugar t-ts," tried to evade arrest, got rough with a telephone and threatened to urinate in his jailhouse holding cell.

"My life is f--ked,"
the Mad Max star said, more than once, per TMZ.com, after being pulled over by a sheriff's deputy early Friday morning on Pacific Coast Highway.

According to the sheriff's department, Gibson was flagged for speeding in 2006 Lexus sedan--allegedly going about 80 mph in a 45-mph zone. A sobriety test revealed Gibson's blood-alcohol level to be 0.12, exceeding California's 0.08 legal limit, the department said...

According to TMZ.com, Gibson called the arresting deputy a "motherf---ker," whom he was going to "f--k" on account of "he [Gibson] 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me [the deputy]."

Later, the Website reported, Gibson ranted about the "f--king Jews," who "are responsible for all the wars in the world," and asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?" (Gibson, who helped build a Catholic church in Malibu, is not.)

A request by the deputy for Gibson to get inside the patrol car was met with a dash by the actor back to his Lexus. Or, as the report posted on TMZ.com put it: "Gibson attempted to escape arrest"...

Gibson, 50, previously was arrested for drunken driving in 1984 in Toronto. By 1991, he later told ABC News, he was so steeped in addiction that he considered jumping out a window.
If only. The world could have been spared The Passion of the Christ, The Singing Detective, Signs, We Were Soldiers, What Women Want, The Patriot, The Million Dollar Hotel, Payback, Lethal Weapon 4, FairyTale: A True Story, Conspiracy Theory, Fathers' Day, Ransom, Pocahontas, Braveheart, Maverick, The Man Without a Face, The Chili Con Carne Club, Forever Young and Lethal Weapon 3. (I did like Chicken Run, however.)

Oh, Snap!


"There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance."
The New York Times destroys Holy Joe Lieberman and endorses Ned Lamont

July 29, 2006

A Saturday Morning Cartoon...For Yoooooooou!


Tristero Writes a Letter


And I'd like you to read it:
Open Letter To Liberal Hawks

by tristero

Dear Liberal Hawks and other fence sitters from 2002/2003 (you know who you are),

Don't even think about a "thoughtful, measured response" to this bullshit.
President Bush proudly declared that American foreign policy no longer seeks to “manage calm,” and derided policies that let anger and resentment lie “beneath the surface.” Bush said that the violence in the Middle East was evidence of a more effective foreign policy that addresses “root causes.”
This is sheer, abject lunacy of the sort that imagined the invasion of Iraq would lead to city squares in Iraq named after George W. Bush and the invasion would pay for itself out of oil revenues. The only appropriate reaction is to very loudly proclaim this is the reasoning of madmen. No rational human being thinks like this.

Your credibility has been ruined already by falling for the preposterous lies and rationalizations prior to the Iraq invasion. If you take this seriously, your immortal soul is majorly on the line. While I'm enjoying an eternity of Mozart, Bach, and Howling Wolf, you will be suffering the unbearable agony of exposure to Kenny G, 24/7. Forever. You don't want to risk that, trust me.

Repeat: there are no serious issues to be "engaged" in Bush's latest drooling remarks. The people who came up with an American foreign policy based on addressing "root causes" and no longer managing calm need straitjackets. Neither they, nor you, nor the rest of the world will benefit by opportunities to discuss these sick delusions. Under no circumstances should you try to do so.

I hope I've made myself clear.

Love,

tristero
(Link)

Unfortunately, Tristero left out the part where "W" invokes...wait for it...9/11:
David Gregory, NBC News: I’d like to ask you about the big picture that you’re discussing. Mr. President, three years ago, you argued that an invasion of Iraq would create a new stage of Arab-Israeli peace. And yet today there is an Iraqi prime minister who has been sharply critical of Israel. Arab governments, despite your arguments, who first criticized Hezbollah, have now changed their tune. Now they’re sharply critical of Israel. And despite from both of you warnings to Syria and Iran to back off support from Hezbollah, effectively, Mr. President, your words are being ignored.

So what has happened to America’s clout in this region that you’ve committed yourself to transform?



Stewart

(Click to watch our shameless, clueless president)


BUSH: David, It’s an interesting period because, ummm–instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability. For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let’s hope everything is calm — manage calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

And so we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.
(Video nicked from Crooks & Liars)

Trudeau is on a Roll



Smart
(Click for more Doonesbury)

July 28, 2006

The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time


A fun time-waster, courtesy of filmcritic.com, and a nice, inclusive (ie: non-snobby) list (among the 50: Real Genius!). However, I would have added three more (and skipped the worthless Batman Begins):

Time Bandits: Young Kevin, after traveling through time with six dwarves, warns his Mum & Dad not to touch the large stone that's inside their toaster oven:
"Mom! Dad! It's evil! Don't touch it!"
[Kevin's parents explode]
"Mom? Dad?"
Local Hero: After Mac (Peter Reigert) makes a failed, drunken attempt to trade places with Gordon Urquhart, accountant, bartender, innkeeper, husband to Stella and community representative of a small Scottish coastal village ("I'd make a good Gordon, Gordon"), the film ends with Mac's return to the rat race, his yearning for the quiet Scottish life touchingly conveyed by the final shot of the town's red phone booth, it's phone ringing, ringing and ringing...

Duck Soup: After plunging Freedonia into an unnecessary war, it's leader, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) leads his country to victory with the help of Chicolini and Pinkie (Chico & Harpo):
Rufus to Pinkie: "You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember while you're out there risking life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are."
As the absurd battle comes to a conclusion, Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) declares "Victory is ours!" and begins to sing the Freedonia national anthem. She is then pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables. Comedy gold.

Completely In Over Her Head


Oy

Cold War expert Condi Rice has had a tough week. Forced to finally do something about the Israel-Lebanon conflict, she has proven herself to be as incompetent as her boss as well as some of his previous, questionable hires ("Heckuva Job Brownie," anyone?). As Maureen Dowd recently put it:
Now the secretary of state is leaving, reluctantly and belatedly, to do some shuttle diplomacy that entails little diplomacy and no shuttling. It’s more like air-guitar diplomacy.

Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,’’ she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,’’ which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver.

“I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do,” she said.

Keep more civilians from being killed? Or at least keep America from being even more despised in the Middle East and around the globe?
All of this air-guitar diplomacy has put Condi in a very serious mood and has forced her to display the only known skill she has. Cue the piano:

Piano
"It is not a time that is frivolous. It is a serious time. I will play something that is in accordance with my serious mood," said Rice about her planned performance for The Association of South East Asian Nations.
Yes, but if she's so serious, can she explain what the deal is with her outfit? From head to toe, she's a sartorial disaster. The only thing serious is how seriously bad her choices are.

At least her predecessor had the good sense to be ridiculous on purpose:

Gotta Love New Yorkers


New York magazine interviewed 100 random New Yorkers and asked them what they thought President Bush should do about the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Here are a few of their answers:
"Direct talks with Iran and Syria." "Pull out of Iraq." "Stay the course." "Embrace Islam." "Bush can do anything as long as he is 100 percent supporting Israel." "Resign." "Die." "These things are over his head. He's an imbecile." "Pray more."

July 27, 2006

If You Don't Like This, You Are No Longer My Friend



Gumnaamb

(Click to download Windows Media file)


Okay. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. But this video mash-up of a Bollywood classic with Primus makes me giddy. If the footage looks familiar, you might remember it from the movie Ghost World. And, if like me, you were dying to see the entire dance scene after the movie, you can (of course) find it over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog (which is where I found the aforementioned mash-up in the first place).

Are we still friends?

"Land of Confusion"




Other than an excuse to get Spawn creator Todd McFarlane to make another music video, can anyone tell me why the metal band Disturbed would cover this Genesis song? I mean, don't you automatically have to hand in your metal credentials once you admit to liking Phil Collins-era Genesis?

July 26, 2006

Colbert Makes It Look Oh So Easy




Watch Stephen as he puts the morning news shows in their place.

Well, There Goes My Lunch


From Daniel Edwards, the man who gave us Britney-giving-birth-on-a-bearskin- rug, comes The Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Woman President of the United States of America:

Hillary


The piece was inspired by actress Sharon Stone who recently said:
“I think Hillary Clinton is fantastic. But I think it is too soon for her to run. This may sound odd but a woman should be past her sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power and I don’t think people will accept that. It’s too threatening.”
Hat tip to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Are You "Rapture Ready?"



Rapture

WFMU's Beware of the Blog wants to help you prepare for the day of reckoning. Click George and his friends for everything you need to know before you burn in Hell.

Ladies & Gentlemen: The Whoboys!



Condi

The Who Meets The Beach Boys (and much, much more!)

Click the surfing Townshend to download 'em (while you can).

Today's "Funny"




(Click for more Doonesbury)

July 25, 2006

Shlomo: Human Beat Box




Salif Keita and Pete Doherty look on in amazement (well, at least Salif looks amazed; I think Pete's just completely wasted) as a nice, Jewish boy named Shlomo gets jiggy with his "folds of mucous membranes that project into the cavity of the larynx and have free edges extending dorsoventrally toward the middle line" (and throws in some Missy Elliot and White Stripes for good measure).

(Hat tip to Shullovox)

Borat: The Movie ("Nice!")


Dog Judo!




For more episodes, go here.

Bob

Seriously, Folks: Can't We Get Some Adults In Charge?



Rice


Click our incompetent, petulant, defensive Secretary of State to watch how well she's handling the Israel-Lebanon crisis.

The $64,000 Question



Peace7
(Click to watch)

Elvis Costello, with a little help from his "friends" Fiona Apple, Death Cab for Cutie and Green Day's Billy Joe Armstrong, asks the $64,000 Question (give or take the estimated $430 billion we've already spent on the spectacular failure known as the War on Terror): "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?"

(Taken from VH1 Classic's Decades Rock Live.)

One other question: WTF is Fiona Apple doing with her dress?!?! Is she dancing with it? Is she angry with it? Is she trying to remove a stubborn stain? (I know, that's four questions).

July 24, 2006

My New Favorite Commericial



Vonage
(Click to watch)

Sometimes, all you need is one camera, one long take, a couple of good actors and a great choreographer.

NEW New York Dolls



Dance
(Click to watch/listen)

Not too like the old New York Dolls but a helluva lot better than it should be (coming some 30-odd years after their last album).


Dolls
(Click to buy)

July 22, 2006

"After the Garden" - Living with War




Support Our Environment ('cause Lord knows our President doesn't).



"Families" - Living WIth War




Support Our Troops ('cause Lord knows our President doesn't).



July 21, 2006

The Amazing Talking Embryos and the "Culture of Life" Loophole






onegoodmove has posted the Daily Show's genius take on the Bush administration's morally ambiguous "culture of life." As Jon Stewart reminds us: "Every being counts. Every person matters...Each one precious. Each one sacred-ish." Click Jon to watch.

July 20, 2006

F*ck Bush



Flip Off


Click the cute little girl, seen here flipping off the Preznit while he explains why he's such a douche bag for blocking federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and listen to my buddy Diriki Mack and The KulchaShock Movement wax poetic about why our "daily vow" should be to "F*ck Bush."

For more Diriki and friends, go here. Pass it on...

I Honestly Don't Know How I Feel About This*




*"This" being Loose Change, a short film that examines what might really have happened on September 11, 2001.

The PC Guy Explains Net Neutrality


The Top 100 Music Videos of All Time?


Stylus Magazine apparently made their intern scour YouTube and put together a very questionable list of the Top 100 Music Videos of All Time. There are a number of choices that I find laughable (Britney's Baby One More Time, Lisa Loeb's Stay, David Bowie & Bing Crosby singing Little Drummer Boy?!?) but I guess you can argue that there's something for everyone (plus they've saved you all of that time it would have taken you to scour YouTube for 100 okay-to-great music videos).

I'm glad this one made the list:



(reminds of when I actually could stand to watch MTV -- before it was destroyed by, first, Def Leppard and then The Real World and all of that show's evil spawn)

Have fun...

July 18, 2006

"Don't Drop The Baby!"



American Storage


From the people who brought us this and this, comes the second installment of Wholphin. It features short films by Steven Soderbergh, Errol Morris, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Richter and a bunch of people you probably never heard of.

Click the pic of Steve Carell above to watch some excerpts, including Jessica Yu's Sour Death Balls, Andrew Jay Cohen's American Storage featuring Carell, David Krumholtz and Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks), Andy Richter's The Quest, Bob Odenkirk's The Pity Card (about a guy who takes a woman on a first date to a Holocaust museum) and some really cool squid footage.

For more about Wholphin, click the cover below:


Wholphin


Editor's Note: You may have noticed that this blog has been starting to favor pop culture over pure politics lately. This is mainly due to news fatigue -- what with the continuing debacle of our war on terror, the horrible tsunami in Java and the Israel/Lebanon mess that our President appears to be completely clueless about, I just have needed to seek solace in mindless diversions every now and then. You know, diversions like this:


Bottled Music - video powered by Metacafe

Sue me.

Pee Wee's Message to President Bush


(who obviously has been hitting the old crack vials lately):

July 17, 2006

President Gutter Mouth



Preznit
(Click to watch)

As we all know, Bush reneged on the whole restore-honor-and-dignity-to-the-White-House-thing a long, long time ago...

July 15, 2006

July 14, 2006

My New Favorite Song



Choir
(Click to watch/listen)

Pure genius courtesy of The Complaints Choir of Helsinki by way of WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

"Low Approval Ratings Can Be Contracted Through Saliva"


The Kiss

Stephen Colbert on Lieberman and that kiss:

July 13, 2006

House O' Dominoes


Sue Everybody


Plame
The gauntlet has been thrown down. Click image to download the entire complaint.

Warning: This Film Made Me Crap My Pants


The Headbutt, Revisted


(a.k.a. All About My Mother)

Headbutt

Headbutt Headbutt Headbutt

Courtesy of WFMU's Beware of the Blog's World Cup Death Watch.

Cut the Traitor Talk


"To all the Republicans who sit in their air-conditioned offices and talk of the courage it takes for them to keep young kids in harm's way -- I say enough. Karl Rove talking about "cutting and running" while he sits on his big, fat backside-saying "stay the course." I say enough! That's not a plan! We've got to have a new direction, and it's clear we need more Democrats in Congress to get that done.

No matter how obvious the mistakes in Iraq become, or how many Americans get fed up, Republicans in Congress and the White House will label you a traitor to your country if you stand up and question them. I hope you will join me in my call to House Republicans by signing this petition. We hope to deliver 50,000 names to the Speaker of the House, asking them to cut the traitor talk and start to get a change of direction in Iraq -- if you believe this Republican Congress has abdicated its responsibility long enough, please join us."
Join John Murtha and sign the petition.

July 12, 2006

Never seen anything like that before, falling bodies tumble 'cross the floor...


(Well I'm a tumbler!)*



* "Born Under Punches" - Talking Heads

Lewis Black's Breakthrough



Lewis
(Click to watch)

Excerpt from Lewis Black's most recent HBO special, "Red, White & Screwed." You can buy Lewis' latest album over at emusic (You get 25 free downloads just for trying the service. Lewis' album has 18. Do the math, browse the site and get some more free MP3s).

"Did it really ding-dong?"


Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello try to answer some big questions on this blistering version of Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?" featuring The Imposters, Anthony "AB" Brown and The Crescent City Horns. One question not addressed: What the hell is up with drummer Pete Thomas' facial hair?


EC & AT
(Click to watch/Dancing permitted)

Buy the album here.

July 11, 2006

-P-O-O-D-L-E-




(Click the Poodle with the red ball to learn how to play the game of "Poodle")

NSFW

(via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

For more info, go here.

The Eraser


Radiohead's Thom Yorke (kinda sorta a spiritual descendant of Syd Barrett) has just released his first solo album:



(Click the CD cover to stream the entire album. All you have to do is register for free and then choose "Album of the Month")

R.I.P., You Crazy Diamond


Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett has passed away. He was 60.













July 10, 2006

Moron-in-Chief


And besides being an idiot, he's unbelievably arrogant, smug, contemptuous and defensive:



(Click to watch)

Video stolen from Crooks and Liars.

Pourquoi?!?!?!?




What the hell could Marco Materazzi have said to provoke Zizou?

UPDATE: Rumor has it, Materazzi called Zidane a "dirty terrorist":
France captain Zinedine Zidane was apparently called a "dirty terrorist" by Marco Materazzi before he head-butted the Italy defender in Sunday's World Cup final, the anti-racism group SOS Racism said on Monday...

Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was shown a red card after the incident and Italy went on to win on penalties after the match was tied 1-1 following extra time.

The Paris-based group called for an inquiry and said world soccer's governing body FIFA had recently toughened sanctions against racism.

"It's for this reason that SOS Racism asks in a determined fashion for FIFA to shed light on this altercation and that sanctions laid out in the official rules be applied should this be the case," SOS Racism said.

Neither Zidane nor Materazzi have spoken in public about what had passed between them before the incident. French television reported that Zidane would talk about the incident "in the coming days".


Despite the incident, my wife and I got swept up in the excitement and came down with World Cup Fever. Time to plan for South Africa, 2010. In the meantime, we can all watch this for the next four years:

soccer

July 07, 2006

the party party PRESENTS:


bush
"Sunday Bloody Sunday" by George W. Bush

Click the smirking chimp to watch.

July 06, 2006

Vacation Photo Blogging!


Just slightly (and we do mean slightly) less irritating than visiting friends and suffering through their vacation photos...

pint
"The best beer ever" (we said that after each pint)

pub
Standing room only to watch England lose the World Cup once again ("curse you, Ronaldo!")

restaurant
Rather than stand, we found a tiny Italian restaurant (with an even tinier TV) to watch England lose the World Cup (once again)


Mews
Site of one of my favorite Kinks' songs, "Berkeley Mews" (click the pic to listen)

tube
The Tube. Air conditioned stations but non-air conditioned cars. Extra points for large maps, easy access, cleanliness. New York Subway: 1/London Underground: 3

Super
A "super" window display

danger
We're big fans of Stick Figures in Peril


wimbledon
We "queued" for an hour and a half in the blazing heat for limited Wimbledon access. Here's the action on Court 16 between 4 guys we never heard of.


Busker
And finally, a song to sum it all up (Click to watch & listen).