I'm Just F'in Sayin'

Our Dear Leader (aka Pouty McShitfaced) feels the love:

President George W. Bush's job rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, amid strong opposition to the Dubai Ports World deal and increasing pessimism over the war in Iraq, according to a CBS News poll released on Monday.

Bush's overall job approval fell eight points from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance on the job, the poll found...

Long among his strongest suits, ratings for Bush's handling of Iraq fell to a new low of 30 percent, down from 37 percent in January, the poll found.

In addition, 62 percent of Americans said they think U.S. efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq were going badly compared with 36 percent who said things were going well...

According to the poll, 70 percent believe the Dubai Ports World transaction should not be allowed to go through while only 21 percent did not see the ports deal as a problem.

One surprising bright spot for the administration in the polls was that Americans appeared ready to move on after Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident. Seventy-six percent said it was understandable that the accident could happen.

However media coverage of the accident may have made the public's generally negative view of Cheney a bit more so, CBS said. The poll found that 46 percent hold a negative view of Cheney and 18 percent hold a favorable view, down from a 23 percent favorable rating in January.

Gotta love the "one surprising bright spot." Lamest...duck...ever.

Click the pic and drive your friends, family and co-workers* crazy with these (hilarious? annoying?) Dave Chapelle/Rick James audio outtakes courtesy of our friends at WFMU (they're in the middle of their on-air marathon; you can donate over at their blog).

*Warning: The word "bitch" may not be very work safe.

Lucky James Wolcott has seen V For Vendetta and liked what he saw:

V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed “controversial” (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth. Cultural conservatives will loathe it without seeing it (they love not having to leave their houses to lament the latest installment of civilization’s decline and fall) once they hear of and read about the movie’s disturbing political parallels (a fascistic TV host with a witty resemblance to Berlusconi, fertilizer explosives a la Timothy McVeigh; torture, renditions, and subway bombings; black hoods that will be forever associated with Abu Ghraib). Yet lots of cultural liberals with educated tastes will find it anxiety-producing and irresponsible too, not only because they’re more comfortable with humanistic stories and documentary techniques than with pop spectacle (as Kael discovered whenever she praised upstart movies like DePalma’s Carrie or The Warriors and received letters from profs and Ph.D couples complaining about her soiling the New Yorker’s space on trash), but because V for Vendetta doesn’t just depict a 1984’s dystopia--it advocates radical remedy, and illustrates what it advocates with rhapsodic, operatic, orgasmic flourish.

I am SO there...

(Click the link to read the whole review.)

William F. Buckley, the conservative's conservative, declares Game Over:

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed...

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans...

And the administration has, now, to cope with failure...

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."

Unfortunately Bill, that's a no-can-do for President John Wayne:

"The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission. For the safety and security of the American people, that's not going to happen on my watch."

So, unless someone gives Pouty McShitfaced some anti-arrogance pills, it's gonna me more maiming (16,653 U.S. soldiers wounded, so far) and more killing (2,294 dead as of today) for months and years to come.

(Photo by Nubar Alexanian. Coalition casualties courtesy of George W. Bush.)

(Click to Watch)

Darren McGavin, 1922-2006

Long before he became a yearly holiday tradition for reciting these lines:

Mr. Parker: It's a Major Award!
Swede: Shucks I wouldn't know that. It looks like a lamp.
Mr. Parker: What is a lamp, you nincompoop? It's a Major Award. I won it!
Swede: Damn, hell, you say won it?
Mr. Parker: Yeah, mind power, Swede; mind power.

...Darren McGavin cemented his place in the pop culture pantheon with his portrayal of grizzled reporter and monster-chaser Carl Kolchak, The Night Stalker...

...a show which has been cited as a huge influence on Chris Carter, creator of the X-Files.

R.I.P. Darren. Life is, indeed, "Fra-Gee-Lay"...

Click the pic to watch the amazing story of Jason McElwain, the 17-year-old team manager for the Athena High School basketball team in Greece, NY. Last week, Jason got his first and only chance to actually play in a game -- unusual for a team manager and even more unusual given the fact that Jason is autistic. But that's not the most incredible part of this story...

(Thanks to Crooks & Liars for the video)

Don Knotts, 1924 - 2006

Growing up, I was always partial to Don's performance in The Incredible Mr. Limpet...



But I suppose the young kids today will always know him for his searing portrayal of the 43rd President of the United States:



(Click to Watch)

(Click to Watch)

Brilliant video mash-up of Toy Story 2 & Requiem for a Dream, created by Mike at Alien Panic.

Wolcott & Dreyfuss on Iraq (click the links for the complete posts):

Robert Dreyfuss, one of the keenest analysts of the unfolding debacle, writes:

"With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq."

Poor President Bush, prince of fools. He let the neoconservative creative destructors play upon his religiosity (and Cheney's power hunger) and persuade him that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be a transformative moment that would set democracy and freedom in motion across the region, and crown him in history with Churchillian honor. I believe Bush wanted democracy in Iraq, or convinced himself that he believed it after the Chalabi-as-chess-king scheme fell through, because such belief flatters his pride in his own idealism. But the intellectual architects of the policy didn't care. If there was peace and stability in the new Iraq that would strength America's power in the region and bolster Israeli security, fine; if Iraq fissured into factional strife, fire, and chaos, better still.

Bush played for a fool? What a surprise. I cannot, however, feel sorry for Pouty McShitfaced. No one as arrogant as our president could ever elicit sympathy from me. I do feel sorry for the people of Iraq. And I feel sorry for the stupid Americans who believed in our president's fantasy world. But I'm not sure I can forgive them...

For more, go here.

Sense a theme?

Boston Legal, (ABC) Tuesdays, 10pm

Why? Here's the show's creator, David E. Kelley:



Here is his sleeve:


And here's what he wears on it:



(Click to watch)

In this compilation of clips from a recent episode, Kelley gracefully (and liberally) tells the story of a young rape victim who is refused the morning-after pill* by the Catholic hospital that admitted her, as well as the story of a little girl who, due to a car accident and a subsequent operation, can no longer smile. All of this is surrounded by the sometimes biting, sometimes poignant humor of the team of Denny Crane & Alan Shore (William Shatner & James Spader). I've spared you the nonsense of the sub-plot about the cat on a respirator (Kelley's main problem is his unrestrained, often indulgent, silliness).



* The morning-after pill should not be confused with mifepristone (also called Mifeprex, and formerly known as RU-486), an abortifacient which is taken to end a pregnancy after implantation has occurred. The morning-after pill must be taken before implantation, or it will have no effect.

The morning-after pill may, however, prevent the implantation of an embryo in cases where it fails to prevent fertilization in the first place. Although the United States Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other health agencies define pregnancy as beginning with implantation, some pro-life medical professionals, embryology texts, and activists argue that preventing implantation is unethical, as the blastocyst (early-stage embryo) then dies instead of growing into a fetus and, ultimately, being carried to term.

Recent medical studies in animals (the rat and the monkey) were inconclusive as to how often or whether the morning-after pill prevents implantation; however, this mechanism of action cannot be ruled out in all cases, as it is impossible to prove a negative. Therefore, women who believe it is immoral to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting may wish to avoid use of this drug.

"I feel very strongly that this shouldn’t be about abortion politics. This is a way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and thereby prevent abortion. This should be something we all agree on." – Dr. Susan F. Wood (former director of the FDA Office of Women's Health who resigned in protest after the FDA denied over-the-counter status to EC).

Our president has spoken. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. Bush has told the American people, again and again, that his numero uno job is to protect them so they have no reason to worry their pretty little heads over who's in charge of our major ports of entry.

Ah, yes, but who are those men behind the curtain? Shouldn't the American people have a right to know what's going on behind the scenes of the George W. Bush presidency? Well, it turns out:

The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush's father once served as senior adviser and is a who's who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Another family connection, the president's brother, Neil Bush, has reportedly received funding for his educational software company from the UAE investors. A call to his company was not returned.

Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX/. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.

Fascinating. Tell me more about this "Carlyle Group." Are you sure you want to know? You may not like what you hear:

...since the start of the "war on terrorism", the firm - unofficially valued at $3.5bn - has taken on an added significance. Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president's father. And, until earlier this month, Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm's multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden...

Carlyle partners, who include (Former Secretary of State and Sec. of Treasury James) Baker and the firm's chairman, Frank Carlucci - Ronald Reagan's defence secretary and a former deputy director of the CIA - own stakes that would be worth $180m each if each partner owned an equal slice. As in many areas of its work, though, Carlyle is not obliged to reveal the details, and chooses not to.

Among the defence firms which benefit from Carlyle's success is United Defense, a Virginia-based contractor which makes vertical missile launch systems currently on board US Navy ships in the Arabian sea, as well as a range of other weapons delivery systems and combat vehicles. Carlyle's other holdings span an improbable range, taking in the French newspaper Le Figaro and the company which bottles Dr Pepper...

The Carlyle Group does not employ anyone at its Washington headquarters to deal with the press. Inquiries about the links with the Binladins (as most of the family choose to spell their name) are instead referred to someone outside the company, on condition he is referred to only as "a source familiar with the relationship". This source says: "I can confirm the fact that any Binladin Group investment in Carlyle has been terminated or is being terminated. It amounted to a $2m investment in the Carlyle II Fund, which was anyway a very small portion of a $1.3bn fund. In the scheme of the investments and in the scheme of the business of either party it was very small. We have to get this into perspective. But I think there was a sense that there were questions being raised and some controversy, and for such a small amount of money it was something that we wanted to put behind us. It was just a business decision."

But if the Binladins' connection to the Carlyle Group lasted no more than six years, the current President Bush's own links to the firm go far deeper. In 1990, he was appointed to the board of one of Carlyle's first purchases, an airline food business called Caterair, which they eventually sold at a loss. He left the board in 1992, later to become Governor of Texas. Shortly thereafter, he was responsible for appointing several members of the board which controlled the investment of Texas teachers' pension funds. A few years later, the board decided to invest $100m of public money in the Carlyle Group. The firm's magic touch was already bringing results. Today, it is proving as fruitful as ever.

Think you can handle more? Just remember to breathe:

BUZZFLASH: I recall that reading in the British papers that Tony Blair was considering privatizing a portion of the intelligence apparatus in Britain, and that the Carlyle Group was going to be subcontracted to do some of that.

DAN BRIODY (author of "The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group"): He did, in fact. The new company is called Qinetiq. It’s spelled Q-I-N-E-T-I-Q. It’s the research arm of the ministry of defense in the U.K., which is essentially equivalent to DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] here in the U.S. And the Carlyle Group was part of that transaction, so they own part of Qinetiq. It was a very controversial transaction in the U.K., obviously. I mean, if you could try to imagine a foreign company coming in and buying DARPA from the United States. It’s unimaginable. And particularly a company that’s so stockpiled with very powerful former politicians.

BUZZFLASH: So Tony Blair essentially condoned the privatization of a large section of the British defense intelligence apparatus to the Carlyle Group. It would be comparable for us to subcontract that to a foreign company.

BRIODY: Yes, which I don’t think would ever happen.

No, nothing like that would ever happen...

We're all doomed.

(by M.e. Cohen, member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists)

The amazing Criswell predicts "Your Incredible Future, Where You & I Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives." Among his predictions:

- There will be two political parties: The Conservative Party and the Liberal Party
- The shy and modest will wear body stockings
- Women will decorate their breasts with startling colors while men will decorate their genitals
- Women will legally be able to sell their husbands to other women
- Full medical attention will be available through vending machines
- The coming years will be known as "The Three R's": Riot, Rape & Revelry (which will be replaced by Crisis, Carnage & Chaos)
- LSD, Marijuana and Speed can change your sex
- 95% of your shoes will be made of plastic

(Click to listen to more of Criswell's incredible predictions)

I hearby award the video below to Attaturk over at Rising Hegemon for coining the best term yet for Our Dear Leader. Ladies and Genlemen, I give you...


"Pouty McShitfaced"

Here ya go Attaturk. You deserve it:

Farting Preacher IV Watch it now on StupidVideos!

Other guests of our show receive this video of something that smells a lot like misguided teen spirit:



Click to watch

The ever-astute freakgirl has guessed the answer to "Who Said It?" -

"It (Brokeback Mountain) is an incredibly moving movie. I wish that they would take this movie and force these assholes from the religious right [to watch] -- these perverts, these Taliban motherfuckers -- who want to sit there and tell gay people they can't get married ... It shows you how, when gays have to be closeted, they ruin the lives of women and families. Everyone goes through hell. ... It is just outrageous. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, they were both terrific in it."

The correct answer: Howard Stern. Tell her what she's won, Jim:

"A video of Japanese kids with pork chops attached to their heads, being tormented by a giant lizard!"

Click the pic to watch your fabulous prize!

The Trifecta, via Digby:

If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three.

The hubris is illustrated by the fact that they actually thought after years of fear mongering and beating of Islamic terrorist war drums, they wouldn't be questioned about a United Arab Emirates contract for port security. The king shall not be questioned. The incompetence feature is that they believe it is smart to outsource security, of all things, to another country. If there is one thing all sides can agree upon, it's that the US should control its own borders and ports. It's common sense.

And finally, as we should have known, via FDL, it turns out this is also another crony cock-up:

The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Bush Buddies: Doing a heckuva job, as usual.

Our arrogant and reckless President, who has never vetoed anything, is now threatening to veto any legislation that blocks the port deal:

(The President, aboard Air Force One, said) he would veto any legislation to hold up this deal and warned that the United States was sending mixed signals by going after a company from the middle east when they said nothing when a British company was in charge. He goes on to say that it is the lawmakers - members of Congress - that have to step up and explain why a middle eastern company is held to a different standard. He also took issue with a reporter's question aboard the plane saying what is the - kind of the politics of all of this - and he says that this is not a political issue.

However, there appears to be trouble in Republican lock-step land:

CNN has also just learned that the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, a key Republican ally of the President, of course, has just fired off a letter to the President saying he should halt the port deal. He's saying he should also "conduct a more thorough review of the matter before it goes forward." Hastert is also warning that he might introduce legislation if the President does not follow through on that.

This letter almost directly mirrors... what Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sent to the President earlier today. A prepared statement - not a letter - a prepared statement telling the President - complaining - that there had been very little Congressional consultation in this whole process.

Please tell me this is the official end of this shifty-eyed, arrogant, lying pissant and his entire corrupt administration. Jack Cafferty thinks "this may be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back":

"It (Brokeback Mountain) is an incredibly moving movie. I wish that they would take this movie and force these assholes from the religious right [to watch] -- these perverts, these Taliban motherfuckers -- who want to sit there and tell gay people they can't get married ... It shows you how, when gays have to be closeted, they ruin the lives of women and families. Everyone goes through hell. ... It is just outrageous. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, they were both terrific in it."

(You deserve it if you made it through "The Bottom Line")



(Click to watch)

The Marimba Ponies, aged four through twelve, performing Sabre Dance (all that's missing are the spinning plates).

(Video by way of, once again, WFMU's Beware of the Blog.)

And, if you liked Sabre Dance, you're gonna love Comedian's Gallop

WARNING: The following video might be the most disturbing thing you'll ever see. Our government NEEDS to be tried for war crimes, it's as simple as that. Anybody who disagrees is un-American.



(Click to watch)

"The Bottom Line" by Stephen McQuillen, courtesy of WFMU's Beware of the Blog. Music by Negativland. Torture by the United States of America.

William Cowsill, lead singer of US family group The Cowsills, has died in Canada at the age of 58.

Cowsill, whose group inspired TV series The Partridge Family, had been ill for several months but no cause of death was given.

The singer, whose hits in the 60s and 70s included Hair, died in Calgary, Alberta, on Friday.

His brother and fellow band member Barry Cowsill drowned during Hurricane Katrina last year.

The news of William "Billy" Cowsill's death came during a memorial service for Barry.

For a history of The Cowsills, go here. Susan Cowsill ("and Spaghetti!") went on to indie fame with the group Continental Drifters, which also featured Peter Holsapple (the dBs) and Vicki Peterson (The Bangles). To hear The Cowsills performing their classic cover of Hair ("...don't ever have to cut it 'cause it stops by itself"), go here. And go here for a Cowsills shoutout courtesy of Hank from The Larry Sanders Show.

Do allow yourself to be liberally covered in face and body paint, real and/or photoshopped, especially if the photographers are Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (they seem to know what they are doing):





Don't allow yourself to be photographed while uncomfortably reclining topless, especially while holding a lit cigarette, even if the photographer is Annie Liebowitz (contrary to popular belief, she is not the God of Photography):



The only people who ever looked sexier with a cigarette were Humphrey Bogart and Jean Paul Belmondo imitating Bogart in Breathless:




(Notice how sexy Jean Seberg looks with a shirt on, sans cigarette)

For my readers: Do check out The New York Times Magazine's Great Performers portfolio.

Don't waste your money on this month's Vanity Fair (the more copies they sell, the more it will encourage guest editor and Keira Knightley sniffer Tom Ford):

From a friend in England:

After numerous rounds of "We don't know if Osama is still alive", Osama himself decided to send George Bush a letter in his own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game.

Bush opened the letter and it appeared to contain a single line of coded message:

370HSSV-0773H

Bush was baffled, so he emailed it to Condi Rice. Condi and her aides had no clue either, so they sent it to the FBI. No one could solve it at the FBI so it went to the CIA, then to the NSA. With no clue as to its meaning they eventually asked Britain's MI-6 for help.

Within a minute MI-6 cabled the White House with this reply:

"Tell the President he's holding the message upside down."

Clive Thompson's "Blogs to Riches" (New York Magazine, 2.20.06) was met by deafening silence among the "A-list" bloggers mentioned and/or profiled in the article. I wonder if some of the more left-oriented bloggers (Atrios, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars) feel guilty about making money and are afraid to publically acknowledge the fact that the new media has become a lot like the old media (like it or not, they've become their own version of The Kewl Kidz of the Beltway).

As a lowly C-list blogger, (D-list is more likely, seeing as there are over 27 million blogs out there), I often ask myself, "Why the hell do I blog?" Blogging is harder than it might seem if for no other reason than the (self-imposed) demand to continually post something new, brilliant and witty (all three of which I usually fail spectacularly at). Then there is the knowledge that I'm more or less blogging in a void in which a relatively small number of visitors actually read, watch or listen to what I do.

So, the answer to my "why blog" question always harks back to the original three reasons for starting a blog in the first place: 01) To share things I love (music, film, TV, weird stuff, websites, etc.) with family, friends and (hopefully interesting) strangers; 02) To do my small part in helping to defeat George W. Bush in 2004 (I began blogging in September of '04) which has morphed into doing my small part to defeat the policies of George W. Bush which has morphed into doing my small part to simply add to the screaming and banging one's head against the wall; and 03) To have a completely uncensored creative outlet (I work in the TV promotion business which, believe it or not, has a lot of rules. For instance, the word "fuck" is frowned upon).

All three of these reasons feel very personal to me and, at the time I started, I naively thought blogging was as personal as it got. But, with the emergence of companies like Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc., the personal for many in the blogging community has given way to the profitable. Of course, it's easy to see why people would be seduced by the idea of actually making money from doing something they loved (what a concept!), but I think the concept gets a little sticky when politics are involved.

In Thompson's article, Elizabeth Spiers, a professional blogger who first found fame at Gawker.com, describes her own about-to-be- launched blog empire as something that will "be more like the mainstream media, really....Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest..." But is that what the original bloggers intended or was it something more communal and democratic? The idea of selling your diary entries does seem perverse but once blogs went from "I drunk-dialed my ex-girlfriend last night" to "AndrewSullivan.com needs your support more than ever. Online ads pay for only a tiny fraction of our expenses; reader contributions are still our most important source of income," well, obviously, the paradigm had shifted permanently (See? 9/11 really did change everything).

As a lefty political blogger, I always thought that "we were all in this together" but I've learned that that simply is not always the case. At first I had the good luck of being linked to by bloggers that inspired me to start blogging in the first place, notably World o' Crap and The Rude Pundit (still probably the best, most consistent and funniest political bloggers out there). I also had the good and bad luck of being linked to by both Wonkette and Andrew Sullivan on the same day for a video post of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in "Spin Alley" -- good because the traffic was unbelievable; bad because the traffic was so unbelievable that it literally shut down my web host for the better part of the day (trust me, the best way to lose traffic is to have visitors come up empty when trying to access your page).

It's been all downhill, as far as links go, from there. It's admittedly frustrating but it's sooooo not the end of the world for me. I still blog because I enjoy it. It's just that, every once in awhile, I post something that I wish more people could see or enjoy (for example, my "Best of 2005" music post: I assumed that people would be clamoring for 80 minutes of free music. Silly me). What really gets me though is the sometimes lofty attitude that has formed among some of the more popular bloggers. Many have actually written lengthy, snotty posts about other not-as-successful bloggers who have the nerve to troll for links (guilty as charged but how do they think they themselves got popular in the first place?).

Probably the worst example of the high and mighty attitude for me was when I had the audacity to ask a certain political video blogger how he embedded his videos on his webpage. Here is his exact response:

Thats for you to figure out. lol very tricky and cost a lot of money. I'm still not happy yet, but everyone is stealing our idea to host video and even in some cases stealimg the video outright or linking to our server and not to the site., so we have to keep it as secret as possible.

Pretty fucking hilarious, right? "That's for you to figure out." I felt like writing back "I know you are but what am I" but resisted and just wrote back, "Oh well, I thought we were all in this together" (I'm obviously fond of that thought). The best part of his response, though, was the "everyone is stealing our idea" bit. First of all, I posted videos two months before this assclown. Second of all, I would never presume to have an original idea about anything unless, of course, it was, um, truly original. Blogs like the excellent onegoodmove run by Norm Jenson have been posting videos for quite some time now, well before "Mr. That's For You To Figure Out," and I don't see Norm whining about nasty little blogger thieves (as a matter of fact, I recently e-mailed Norm the same video embedding question and he immediately responded with a how-to e-mail; unfortunately, I'm so un-tech-savvy that I haven't been able to figure it out, but someday...).

The only explanation for the tendency of the new Kewl Kidz to want to shut out the lesser-knowns has to be M-O-N-E-Y money (Liz Phair's "Shitload of Money" happens to be playing right now on my iPod and she happens to spell out the word at the end of the song so it just popped into my head. I'm easily suggestible. The chorus actually begins with: "It's nice to be liked but it's better by far to get paid" -- how appropriate for this little diatribe). I'm pretty sure "Mr. lol" has never linked to onegoodmove and I can only assume that it's because onegoodmove is seen as "competition." Once again (everybody this time): "I thought we were all in this together." Seriously, do you want to defeat the Conservative movement or do you want to make shitloads of money?

I don't expect an answer. Or a link...

5'9" Nate Robinson dunks over 5'7" Spud Webb:

Now if only Nate and the Knicks could figure out how to actually win basketball games...

More photoshop brilliance, courtesy of Worth1000. Click the egg to see more.

I know, I know: There's nothing worse than sitting through someone else's vacation slides or movies. But how often do you get to see both a Mexican Elvis impersonator and some nifty Day of the Dead dancers? These short movies were taken on my digital camera during our trip to Oaxaca last fall (I meant to post them a long time ago but life got in the way). By the way, the Elvis impersonator was a roving troubadour who turned up at an excellent Oaxaca City restaurant called Casa Oaxaca...the same restaurant where we saw Jack Black and Chuck White who were in town shooting Nacho Libre (from the director of Napoleon Dynamite).




"All Shook Up"



"Dia de la Muerte"

(Click each pic to watch)

(Click to watch)

(courtesy of Talking Points Memo)

It's nice to see that The Daily Show has given one of my favorite comedians and palindrome fanatic Demetri Martin an appropriate showcase, entitled Trendspotting:




(Click to watch)

From Think Progress:

The Bush administration has outsourced the operation of six of the nation’s largest ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country with troubling ties to international terrorism. The $6.8 billion sale would mean that the state-controlled Dubai Ports World would control “the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.”

So, whatever happened to this strategy:

"The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor terrorists, because they are equally guilty of murder."

(from the White House web page on "Fighting a Global War on Terror")

Conan O'Brien gets some safety tips while "hunting" with the late Hunter S. Thompson (who, much like our second-in-command, once accidentally shot his assistant):


And courtesy of onegoodmove, a short but oh-so-sweet video of America's new favorite rifleman:



(Click to watch)

I've been searching the web for days, trying to find a video of Peter Gabriel performing John Lennon's Imagine at the Olympics. I finally found it. Hmmmn...


(Click here to watch the video, courtesy of Peter's World Blog)

Very sad. I remember when Peter could sing and had hair, sort of:

Bonus Video (featuring lots of hair. And some prancing about too!):

(Editor's note: Phil Collins might have actually been considered cool when these clips were made. It would take another 15 years or so for him to completely destroy all of his cool-cred by releasing "Sussudio" in 1990.)

Brilliant and creepy.

(for more, go here)

Gerry Casale is a busy man. In addition to being involved with the hideously stupid Devo 2.0, he also has a new band, Jihad Jerry & The Evildoers. You can watch their video for Army Girls Gone Wild right now:



and download another song, The Owl (free!), here.

All of this could be considered offensive. But not nearly as offensive as the real thing:

I've noticed that this blog loads differently depending on both your OS and your browser (items that should be centered, aren't; the lefthand column shows up at the bottom of the page, etc). Firefox is my preferred browser but even Firefox sometimes messes up my page, particularly with YouTube clips (mysterious grey boxes have been appearing randomly on the blog page as a result). One solution: play with the size of your browser window; it's fun and it may yield the desired results.

- Your pal, Krup

Hear Dick perform his new single "Go F@$ck Yourself" at Folsom Prison (obviously not work safe).

John Kricfalusi, the man who gave us Ren & Stimpy, has a blog! Among the cool items so far:

This collage of proposed cartoon shows that were all rejected by stiffs in suits:

and a series of drawings of "the most beautiful people on the planet":

Could Brit Hume be a bigger idiot? He actually asked "Dead-eye Dick" the above question:



(Click the Dick to watch)

But John at AMERICAblog asks the question that Brit was too biased to ask:

If Cheney shot his friend in the face and chest because the friend was hiding behind some bushes, as Cheney alleges (remember, all this time the Cheney people said it was the other guy's fault for hiding and not announcing himself), then how did Cheney watch his friend fall to the ground?

Must have been the one beer...


(Thanks to Salon for "letting" me steal the video.)

Vice President Dick Cheney, while hunting wild geese in the Rose Garden, accidentally shot President Bush twice, once in the heart and once in the head. "I didn't really shoot the President twice," said Cheney. "The second time I shot him, I was president. It wasn't until my third shot, where I accidentally shot my own foot, that I had shot the president twice.

I was officially injured and unable to govern, when Dennis Hastert came in, and stepped on the butt handle of the rifle causing it to swing up like a rake and shoot his hair off. I guess I'm officially responsible for that too, meaning I shot the acting president for a total of three occupants of the oval office. I'm not proud, but it is a record."

- Steve Martin, The Huffington Post

From "The photos America doesn't want seen" courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald


* Reason Online:

On Terry Gross' Fresh Air radio program May 18, (editor of the Weekly Standard, William) Kristol said "I don't think we should obsess about Abu Ghraib, to be totally honest"; consigned the problem to "a couple of extremely bad apples"; and then made this startling admission:

"A month ago [Robert] Kagan and I wrote an editorial suggesting Rumsfeld should be fired, or at least suggesting to Bush that he order Rumsfeld to change policies... I must admit in the last week or two, because of the hysteria over Abu Ghraib, I felt like I had to defend Rumsfeld a little because I just don't think it's at all fair to hold him responsible for this. You know, there could be better Defense secretaries. I don't think he should be fired under pressure probably right now."

Whatever...

(Click to watch)

Apparently, it's rude to jump up onstage, uninvited.

(courtesy of WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Paul Hackett, the outspoken, anti-war Veteran has dropped out of the Ohio Senate race, citing pressure from Democratic leaders:

Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel have not only strong-armed Iraq War vet Paul Hackett out of the Ohio senate race, but out of politics altogether...

"For me, this is a second betrayal," Hackett told the NYT. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."

Not only do I want my country back*, I want my party back. Jeez, what a bunch of losers.


*This past weekend, my oldest brother asked me what country exactly do I want back. An excellent question, the point being that perhaps our country has been living a great big lie for quite a long time. So, I guess what I really mean is that I want the country that was supposedly created by the Declaration of Independence and improved upon by the Constitution of the United States. Really, is that too much to ask?

...from Salon (click the link to watch the video; non-subscribers have to suffer through some sort of ad first).

And here's one of it's latest contributions to man, er, dogkind:




For more information (a lot more information), go to The Monorail Society.

djBC has created another collection of Beatles/Beastie Boys mashups. Download 'em while you can, here.

• "Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It's Dick Cheney."

• "But here is the sad part — before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor."

• "We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."

• "The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he's fine. He took a little in the wallet."

(source: AP)

And, from the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska:

Top Ten Dick Cheney Excuses

10. "Heart palpitation caused trigger finger to spasm"

9. "Wanted to get the Iraq mess off the front page"

8. "Not enough Jim Beam"

7. "Trying to stop the spread of bird flu"

6. "I love to shoot people"

5. "Guy was making cracks about my lesbian daughter"

4. "I thought the guy was trying to go 'gay cowboy' on me"

3. "Excuse? I hit him, didn't I?"

2. "Until Democrats approve medicare reform, we have to make some tough choices for the elderly"

1. "Made a bet with Gretzky's wife"

(source: The Late Show with David Letterman)

(Click pic for music trax and a link to buy your very own "Dick is a Killer" t-shirt)

Editor & Publisher has some questions for Dick and The White House.

I'd love to use the snowstorm as an excuse for the lack of blogging the past couple of days, but the truth is that I'm in Florida for my Dad's 80th birthday. Yesterday we went to the beach. It was 80 degrees.

Ain't I a stinka?

Time magazine publishes the first picture of Bush and Abramoff:

Talking about the photo, Abramoff has told friends, "I was standing right next to the window and after the picture was taken, the President came over and shook hands with me, and we chatted and joked."

I'm guessing Abramoff is the guy in the back by the window, judging from Abramoff's quote. Not much of a smoking gun but it's a start (and you have to ask, "Why would the Bush administration go through such pains to quash the release of a picture like this?").

If you did, you missed unbelievable crap like this:



...but also great stuff like this:



(Three words: "Bring 'em home.")

You also missed Sly Stone's haircut:

From the funeral for Coretta Scott King:

...both Bush and his father winced as they sat behind the pulpit and heard the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., take several jabs at foreign and domestic policies.

"We know there were no weapons of mass destruction over there, but Coretta knew and we knew there are weapons of misdirection right down here," Lowery said, complaining that were far too many in the U.S. are living in poverty and without health care insurance.

"For war, billions more, but no more for the poor," Lowery continued, a take-off of a lyric from the song "A Time to Love" which drew a roaring standing ovation...

The audience showed where its allegiance lay when former President Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, came to the podium to wild cheers and a long standing ovation.

If you haven't heard, many on the right are upset over what happened at the funeral. The Rude Pundit, backed by the words of Coretta Scott King, sets them straight:

On Martin Luther King Day, 2003 (from the Washington Post):

"We commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. as a great champion of peace who warned us that war was a poor chisel for carving out a peaceful tomorrow...May his challenge and his example guide and inspire us to seek peaceful alternatives to a war with Iraq and military conflict in the Middle East."

(snip)

Regarding poverty: "My husband said we refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vault of opportunity in this nation. And so we've come to cash a check."

Regarding the war in Iraq: "Nonviolence must become the foundation of America's foreign policy. If we want to disarm the world, we must disarm our hearts."

Finally, on January 21, 2005, in a speech in Denver, Colorado (from the Denver Post):

"I think we can do a better job of exploring alternatives to military conflict from now on. We can solve conflicts without terrorism and war. This is the only way to lasting peace and security."

The Rude One:

"In death, the Right, especially, so needs to neuter people who disagreed with them, taking away their real meaning for something more nebulous, "universal," and utterly meaningless. Like, for instance, what President Bush said yesterday at Coretta Scott King's funeral: "Having loved a leader, she became a leader. And when she spoke, America listened closely, because her voice carried the wisdom and goodness of a life well lived." Bush, who did not listen at all to what King had to say, offered more generic platitudes.

So the mini-uproar over what Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery said at the funeral is laughable. Talking about peace and economic justice at Coretta Scott King's funeral is as natural as talking about, say, Catholicism at the Pope's.

Deaths have meanings because of the particulars of a life, not because they can be reduced to fortune cookie messages. Lowery, Carter and others stated, to the President's obvious, slouching discomfort, that the woman's life work continues, and if that makes some people unhappy, well, they weren't too happy with the work or the life to begin with."

This essay is well over a year old. Nothing has changed.

GUESTWORDS: By E.L. Doctorow

The Unfeeling President

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

(Reprinted from The East Hampton Star; thanks to reader Laura)

(Click the strip for more Tom Tomorrow goodness)

The new Fiona Apple video. Choreography and "vocals" by Zach Galifianakis. Enjoy.



(Click to watch)


(Video via videos.antville.org)

- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

Sign the MoveOn Petition:

We demand a thorough and independent investigation of the Bush administration's allegedly illegal wiretapping activities, including:

1. appointment of a special prosecutor to respond to any criminal activity that may have taken place,

2. a thorough, meaningful and open Congressional investigation,

3. protection for all whistleblowers who come forward with evidence of wrongdoing in this program.

Neither did I. Fortunately, Salon has the highlights. Well, the commercial highlights. (Warning: they put together the "best," "middling" and "worst" clips -- I'd stop watching after the best, unless you have to, have to, have to see Jessica Simpson torture a young, pubescent teen or Diddy & Co. get away with an unbelievable double entendre.).

For spots that didn't make Salon's cut, go to AOL.

Update: Freakgirl found every single spot here.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children." - Betty Friedan (1921-2006)


"If anything I consider myself an anarchist." - Al Lewis (1910 - 2006)


(Betty Friedan photo by Mary Ellen Mark; Al Lewis photo courtesy of Trotter Autographs)

Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Diplomacy:

The right side of his mouth - "The Iranian regime is today the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism."



The left side of his mouth - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged the world Saturday to find a diplomatic solution to halt Iran's nuclear program: "The world does not want, and must work together to avoid, a nuclear Iran."

Makes me want to break out into song:

"Better cut off all identifying labels
Before they put you on the torture table...

Never said I was a stool pigeon
I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't wanna hear about that

'Cause you tease, and you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt "

Elvis Costello, "Green Shirt"

(Click the pic to watch MoveOn's new ad)

*with apologies to Judas Priest as well as Beavis & Butthead

You HAVE to read Kung Fu Monkey's complete vivisection of Jason Apuzzo, director of Terminal Island (you remember Terminal Island, don't you?) and member of Libertas -- no, not "the best in lesbian shopping online" -- but rather the "forum for conservative thought on film." Enjoy...

“I truly am not that concerned about him [Bin Laden].” - George W. Bush,
March 13, 2002


From William Lind at AntiWar, via James Wolcott:

Wars, most wars at least, run not evenly but in fits and starts, settling down into sputtering Sitzkrieg for long intervals, then suddenly shooting out wildly in wholly unpredicted directions. The war in Iraq has fallen into a set pattern for long enough that we should be expecting something new. I can identify three factors – there may be more – that could lead to some dramatic changes, soon.

* Osama bin Laden's latest message. Most observers, including the White House, seem to have missed its significance. In it, bin Laden offered us a truce (an offer we should have accepted, if only to attempt to seize the moral high ground). The Koran requires Muslims to offer such a truce before they attack. The fact that bin Laden himself made the offer, after a long silence, suggests al-Qaeda attaches high importance to it.

Why? My guess is because they plan a major new attack in the U.S. soon. I would be surprised if the plan were for something smaller than 9/11, because that could send the message that al-Qaeda's capabilities had diminished. Could this be "the big one," the suitcase nuke that most counterterrorism experts expect somewhere, sometime? That would certainly justify, perhaps require, a truce offer from Osama himself. Of course, al-Qaeda's plan may fail, and it may be for an action less powerful than setting off a nuke on American soil. But the fact that Osama made a truce offer should have set off alarm bells in Washington. So far, from what I can see, it hasn't.

* In Iraq, Shi'ite country is turning nasty. The Brits are finding themselves up against Shi'ite militias around Basra. Moqtada al-Sadr has made it clear he is spoiling for another go at the Americans, saying his militia would respond to any attack on Iran. In Baghdad, the Shi'ites who run things are finding American interference increasingly inconvenient. We are now talking to at least some Sunni insurgents, as we should be, but that means our utility to the Shi'ites as unpaid Hessians is diminishing. Put it all together and it suggests the improbable Yankee-Shi'ite honeymoon may soon end. When it does, our lines of supply and communication through southern Iraq to Kuwait will be up for grabs.

* We are moving toward war with Iran. Our diplomatic efforts on the question of Iranian nuclear research and reprocessing are obviously designed to fail, in order to clear the boards for military action. It will probably come in the form of Israeli air strikes on Iran, which, as the Iranians well know, cannot be carried out without American approval and support.

Click the links to read more, if you have the stomach...

I was going to post a video this morning of Stephen Colbert's interview with former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman. I was very impressed with her. She had no problem knocking the extreme right wing of her party and she seemed to actually believe everything she said, especially when it came to a woman's right to choose and protecting the environment. And then, via Atrios, I came across this article:

Judge Slams Ex-EPA Chief Over Sept. 11

A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood.

U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, students and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the collapse of the World Trade Center.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," the judge said.

She called Whitman's actions "conscience-shocking," saying the EPA chief knew that the fall of the twin towers released tons of hazardous materials into the air.

A call to a spokeswoman for Whitman was not immediately returned.

Not only am I disappointed in Whitman (actually I think she should be jailed for her actions), but I also want to know why the hell Colbert avoided asking her about this. Plus, I'm disappointed in myself for forgetting that she was the head of the EPA during September 11th and it's aftermath and allowing myself to get sucked in by her considerable interview skills last night.

(Link)

So President Bush's plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.

But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still — perhaps more than ever — run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don't take the business of governing seriously.

Here's the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol" and other technologies would allow us "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East."

But the next day, officials explained that he didn't really mean what he said. "This was purely an example," said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. "A veteran researcher," reports The New York Times, "said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol."

Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy "plan" was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say.

For weeks administration sources told reporters that the State of the Union address would focus on health care. But at the last minute the White House might have realized that its health care proposals, based on the idea that Americans have too much insurance, would suffer the same political fate as its attempt to privatize Social Security. ("Congress," Mr. Bush said, "did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security." Democrats responded with a standing ovation.)

So Mr. Bush's speechwriters were told to replace the health care proposals with fine words about energy independence, words not backed by any actual policy.

What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration's achievements. But what's a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush's largest domestic initiative to date. It's also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we've "changed our approach to reconstruction."

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

So now, having squandered billions in Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayer dollars, we've told the Iraqis that from now on it's their problem. America's would-be Marshall Plan in Iraq, reports The Los Angeles Times, "is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding." I guess you can call that a change in approach.

There's a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. ... I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues."

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

The Human-Animal Hybrid Wants to Stop Human-Animal Hybrids:

(Click to Enlarge)

Get your very own Human-Animal Hybrid T-Shirt, perfect for getting yourself kicked out of Presidential speeches, here.

(T-Shirts courtesy of humananimalhybrid.net. Image of the Chimperor courtesy of makethemaccountable.com)

Shortly before the start of Bush's State of the Union speech, Cindy Sheehan was escorted out of the House chamber and arrested for wearing this T-Shirt:


So much for timing. And so much for Freedom of Speech. In addition:

Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Florida, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Support the Troops/Defending Our Freedom."

Great country we got here. Can we have the old one back now?

President Smirky

Salon has a great compilation of "highlights" from the State of the Union. All it's missing is a "spit take."

And for some high seas hi-larity, This Modern World's Tom Tomorrow has the complete pirate translation of last night's speech, mateys...



(Image courtesy of I'm a Human Inbox)

When Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous "malaise days" speech back in 1979, many people thought that it (along with the Iranian hostage crisis) killed his chances of being reelected. Carter never actually used the word malaise but he did say this in his speech:

"I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy...

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America."

Wow, bummer dude.

Fast forward 27 years (gosh I feel old) to George Walker Bush:

"Fellow citizens, we have been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite...We see great changes in science and commerce that will influence all our lives. And sometimes it can seem that history is turning a wide arc, toward an unknown shore."

As Ron Fournier of the AP writes in his excellent analysis of last night's speech:

"Unknown and uneasy."

Not malsaisey enough for you? Here are some more excerpts from Fournier:

The state of the union is fretful. President Bush acknowledged the public's agitated state Tuesday night when he gave voice to growing concerns about the course of the nation he has led for five years.

His credibility no longer the asset it once was, the president begged Americans' indulgence for another chance to fix things.

There is no shortage: the Iraq war, global terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a stingy global economy, skyrocketing health care costs, troubled U.S. schools, rising fuel costs, looming budget deficits and government corruption. All received presidential attention Tuesday night...

The problem for Bush is that few of these troubles are new. He's had four years to ease people's pain.

Nearly 46 million Americans have no health insurance, up nearly a million in the last year. Health care costs are increasing three or four times the rate of inflation.

One of Bush's first successes of his presidency was the 2002 No Child Left Behind, but parents still wonder about the quality of education in their schools. For the first time in generations, American children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did.

Calling for less dependency on foreign oil is a State of the Union evergreen. Bush has done so in every address.

The president who promised to be a uniter, not a divider, has presided over the hyper-polarization of Washington.

Osama bin Laden has not been caught.

Weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq.

Victory in that war seems elusive, with more than 2,240 American troops killed — and counting.

The solutions Bush offered were relatively small-bore and wrapped in familiar language: tax cuts, health savings accounts, alternative energy research and investments in education to help keep America competitive with emerging democracies; and a stay-the-course approach to fighting terrorism...

Bush spoke of the global economy and suggested that competitors like China and India are making gains on the United States. "This creates an uncertainty, which makes it easier to feed people's fears."

He said violent crime, abortions and teenage pregnancies are down in an era that has seen Americans take more responsibility — "a revolution of conscience" he called it. "Yet many Americans, especially parents, still have deep concerns about the direction of our culture, and the health of our basic institutions," he said.

The mood of the nation is unsettled. Nearly 7 of 10 American believes the country is headed in the wrong direction. Bush's job approval ratings are among the lowest of his presidency.

With the Democrats still scrambling to find a unified message and create a new image for themselves, perhaps our only chance of regaining a majority in either the House or Senate this fall will be Bush's continued failures -- only if voters decide to hold his fellow Republicans accountable as well (but I'm sure, in order to deflect criticism of Republicans, we'll be hearing a lot from Karl Rove about how the Democrats are "obstructionists" and, of course unpatriotic).