Olbermann

Give us this day our daily Keith:

Today's Today - Cont'd

Saw this on Olbermann last nite too (he led with it and he was pissed about it - surprise surprise), but it just popped up on Addicting Info:

Lemme be clear - I don't have any problem with how anybody remembers or commemorates or grieves or whatever.  My main thing is that everybody gets to do what they wanna do - which includes doing nothing at all, btw.

Keith Olbermann gets to do it his way and you get to do it your way and I get to do it my way; and we all get to feel however we feel; and we all get to express it however we want as long it doesn't pose a threat to anybody's reasonable expectation of physical safety.

We're a little weird here in USAmerica Incorporated.  I look for exactly this kind of crass commercialism because I think it signals our willingness to move past the Compulsory Solemnity Phase in our process of "getting on with it".

The 3 Stooges In Cairo

I suppose it was better to have these bean-brains in Egypt saying incredibly stoopid things rather than having them at home where some people actually still listen to them when they say incredibly stoopid things.

And while everybody but the Amazing Shrinking Minority was busily trying to ignore this performance, can we at least ask why these boobs think it's OK for them to conduct a little ad lib Foreign Policy?



From a NYT takedown:

President Obama has threatened to cut Egypt’s military aid if the new government does not take swift steps toward a credible, inclusive democracy, including lifting its boot off the Brotherhood. But scholars said Sunday that the ill-informed comments in Cairo suggested that the outsize fears of Islamist extremism among some in Congress may be undermining the administration’s efforts.

“We have a confluence of interests among the coup leaders in Egypt and Islamophobes in the Congress,” said Samer Shehata, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies Egypt and the Brotherhood.
He called the lawmakers’ statements “utterly absurd” and compared the conference to “a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit — unbelievable, ludicrous, almost comic if it wasn’t so painful.”

Shadi Hamid, research director of the Brookings Doha Center, said it was especially “concerning” that members of Congress appeared “so unaware of the basic facts of 9/11.”

All three are outspoken social conservatives who previously raised alarms about alleged infiltration of the United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood as well. Mrs. Bachmann has a particular reputation for attention-grabbing statements, for instance attributing the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed an American ambassador last year to God’s judgment.

Brotherhood leaders say the group has denounced the use of violence as a political tool in Egypt for a half-century. It condemned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which were, in fact, carried out by Al Qaeda. The Brotherhood has explicitly opposed the theology and tactics of violent Islamist groups like Al Qaeda for decades, and Al Qaeda scorns the Brotherhood for its commitment to nonviolence, elections and gradual change.

And Now, For Something Completely Weird

Today's Awesome Critter

Wouldn't it be nice if we could throw a few research bucks at an effort to figure out how we might get something like this to work for us?  It's called Bio-Mimicry, bee-autch.

Today's Today

Every year, I Google "9/11 sale", thinking somebody's gotta have the balls to try it.

I honestly expect some enterprising soul will eventually kick it off and we will begin the next phase in this agonizing process of getting the fuck past it already.

Nothing to report again this year - but hope springs eternal.

Today's Best Wordsmithing

Teabagistan - from Addicting Info:
(on the continuing cry-baby bullshit of certain parts of the country where the Baggers are pushing for "secession")

So the political movement that has wrapped itself in the American flag so tightly that it’s cut the blood flow off to their brains wants to take their toys and run away because they’re not winning the game anymore. It’s important to note that these are the people that are the “real” Americans in their own mind. They love love LOVE America, democracy and mom’s apple pie. But only as long as most of the pie is theirs and they get to make the rules. Once they have to share and everyone else gets a vote, suddenly, democracy is not fair, not right and they want their country back!

--and--

The problem with this plan of making little ruby red states is that it would only delay the inevitable and, actually, be an ENORMOUS drain on the rest of the country. Red states are, by and large, total failures. The decades of sabotaging education and the social safety net while allowing corporations free reign to poison and exploit the population have left far too many of them in dire straights. True to the hypocrisy of the right, even as they scream about helping others with “handouts” they scream even louder if their own handouts are threatened. Even if we allowed them to form, in a generation or two, these right wing utopias would be the equivalent of third world countries. The rich would live lavish lifestyles and everyone else would be dirt poor.

Connect the Secession dot with the Impeachment dot with the Voter Suppression dot, and you get a pretty clear picture of some people who just can't come to terms with the simple fact that they're in a shrinking minority and that their agenda is being rejected by a big (and growing) number of Americans who're getting hip to how shitty these "conservative" policies are.

Because He's Not There

Today's Eternal Sadness

Firing a gun in Yellowstone is against the law, so why was a loaded gun available in the first place?  Isn't this kind of the whole point in reverse?  Guns are outlawed in Yellowstone, so an outlaw had a gun; and now that outlaw's 3-year-old daughter is dead.

(Reuters) - A child died of a gunshot wound on Saturday at a popular campground in Yellowstone National Park, according to park officials, who said the girl's mother reported that her young daughter had shot herself with a handgun.

Emergency responders were unable to resuscitate the girl after her mother called emergency dispatchers from a campsite near Yellowstone Lake, park spokesman Al Nash said in a statement.

The names of the mother and girl in the incident, which is under investigation, were not released pending notification of extended family members, Nash said. The child's age was also not released.

**A U.S. law that took effect in 2010 allowed people to carry guns into national parks as long as federal, state and local firearms laws were met, according to the National Park Service.

Although hunting is permitted at a handful of national parks, including Grand Teton in Wyoming, hunting or even firing a gun is unlawful in Yellowstone, according to park literature.

The forested campsite where the shooting occurred sits near a developed area in the Wyoming section of the park known as Grant Village, which features a ranger station, lodge, stores and other amenities.

Yellowstone, which was the first area designated a U.S. national park and is among the country's most popular outdoor destinations, spans 2.2 million acres of pine forests, river valleys, mountain lakes and geysers in parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, and attracts about 3 million visitors a year.

(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Peter Cooney)

Am I being insensitive?  Should I try to put it a different way?  Go blow yourself - that little girl is dead because law-abiding citizens placed their need to compensate for whatever vulnerability issues they struggle with ahead of common sense and the wellbeing of their family.  Or maybe the parents honestly believed carrying a gun was the best bet to ensure their safety.  I suppose some will call it ironic, but it isn't - it's just fuckin' stoopid.

**In 2009, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) added an amendment to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act that allowed concealed weapons to be carried in national parks. President Barack Obama signed the Credit CARD Act into law in 2010.

Today's Pix

20/20 Hindsight

Wes Clark's been trying for a while to get us to step up and understand what's happening.  Not that he knows everything, but he's a smart cookie and he's been around the block more than once, and he seems at least to have maintained his sense of the need for those checks and balances to prevent too much power from being concentrated in too few hands.

What really strikes me is that even when "the Neo-Cons" - guys like Cheney and Rumsfeld - aren't "in power", they still somehow have the stroke to get us to take on these disgustingly imperial (ie: mercantile) projects.

One other thing:  Eventually, we gotta get hip to ourselves and start to understand that if we lose the need for the oil, the Middle East loses its strategic primacy, and we can stop letting the Saudi Royals (eg) use our Oil Jones to make us dance to whatever tune tickles their fancy at any given time.

Today's PFU

Our Culture of Gun Violence costs us a lot in a lot of ways we're generally not even aware of.

7 Big Ones

Today's Toon

They're All The Same

Yeah, but not really.

hat tip = The Richmonder

Todays' Gun Nut

Out of Florida (natch) a few days ago, Florida Today reports a brand new Stand Your Ground incident:

Officials say Woodward snuck up on a Labor Day barbecue and opened fire at about 12:30 a.m. on Sept. 3, 2012. Police arrived and found Gary Lee Hembree, Roger Picior and Bruce Timothy Blake all had been shot. Hembree and Picior died of their injuries. Blake, who was hit 11 times, survived.

Woodward, 44, is accused of two counts of first-degree felony murder and attempted first-degree felony murder.

Before the incident, police had responded numerous times to the ongoing dispute, according to a release. Woodward and Hembree went to court to discuss the dispute before Judge John D. Moxley. Moxley did not issue an injunction.

The motion filed by Woodward’s attorneys says in the hours prior to the shooting, all three men were yelling at Woodward and that this type of behavior had been ongoing for over a month.

Be sure not to miss the part where Woodward's lawyer invokes The Bush Doctrine to justify his client's murderous intent.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's PFU

It's Called Engineering

All Syria All The Time

I'm not gonna say none of this crap about Syria matters - it does.  But when I look at what passes for debate in congress and all over TV and Radio and Newspapers and the Blogosphere, I'll say none of that matters any more than pissin' in your wetsuit.

Nothing anybody says has anything to do with what's really going on because Obama's not gonna tell us everything he knows - or thinks he knows.

Kerry got himself all worked up - to the point where the expression on his face almost changed (I know, right?).  Anyway, the guy's runnin' around all crazy, yelling stating calmly in his best clear-but-stern-Brahmin-esque voice, "I'm not Colin Powell; I am not Colin Powell, dammit".

Meanwhile, Huckleberry Closet-Case and his best old buddy Grampy McDumfuck wanna make sure everybody knows they're on top of things, and that no matter what happens, America is still large and in charge; and 1986 is gonna be a great year for us - amiright!?!!  USA! USA! USA!

I'd call this a circus inside a circle jerk wrapped in a cluster fuck, but that'd be an insult to all 3.

So here's the deal - this is my considered opinion and what I think I should get paid top dollar for suggesting the Prez should do:

Everybody knows 2 basic things.  One is that Assad's gotta go. The other one is that Assad knows he either "wins" this thing or he dies.  Winning is pretty unlikely no matter what happens, but he can't win even in the short-term if he doesn't have big powerful friends - which he thinks he has in China and Russia.

So here's the play:  Obama has to figure out how to get Putin to dispose of Assad.  And actually, he has to get Putin to believe that by taking Assad out, Russia makes strategic gains in the middle east.  That's what Vlad wants after all.  So Putin jacks Assad, and the ensuing mess is Putin's problem.  But Putin knows all that, so...

...long story short - that's the setup, and here's the sting:  We knock off Assad and make sure Putin's fingerprints are all over the caper - a bit of Polonium-210 residue oughta do it.

Better yet - we get Bejing to do it, and they make sure Putin gets the blame.

Or maybe we could get the Israelis to get the Ugandans to get the North Koreans to get the Chinese to get the Russians...

Where's Curtis Lemay when you really need him?

C'Mon Man

It seems there are people looking to the elections here in Virginia as some kind of bellwether.  Our 4-year election cycle (for Gov, LGov & AG) runs in off-years.  So as the midterm campaigns start to heat up for next year, the prognosticators and the bookies and the junkies are trying to get a read on what's to come.

(Ed Note:  They're doing the same in New Jersey, but nobody here in God's Country really cares what a buncha Yankees are foolin' with up north)

We have the usual Big-Government Moralistas on the Repub side (Ken Cuccinelli, EW Jackson, and Mark Obenshain), running against some Neo-Liberal Clintonians put up by the Dems (Terry McAuliffe, Ralph Northam, and Mark Herring).

Today's OP-Ed piece in RTD by local guru Ken Shapiro laments the possibility of a Democratic sweep, saying Cuccinelli and Jackson are poison, and only Obenshain stands a chance; and then gives us this little gem:

Among the questions: Obenshain’s election-year legislation — now law — making it harder for Virginians to vote and easier to keep secret that they carry a concealed gun. Obenshain also is harangued for a 2009 measure — later withdrawn — that would have required women report miscarriages to authorities within 24 hours.

Obenshain has made his bones in the last several years by pushing a very regressive agenda, and indulging in the kind of uber-pandering to the basest of "the base" that makes most of us more than a little nauseous, and he's the GOP's best chance to forestall this impending disaster?

BTW - if we drive some of the wackier wackos out of electoral politics, and we manage to put a bit more democracy back into the democratic process, and we make it a little easier for actual flesh-and-blood people to live a little freer - please tell me again how that qualifies as some kinda disaster(?)

BTW also too - Mark Obenshain is another political legacy puke.  See Dick Obenshain at Wikipedia