How the Mighty Have Fallen, Part 1

Rancid. What a great band. A lot of people I know are real into the first self-titled record, but I am not one of them. After that, however, it's hit after hit - Let's Go, And out Come the Wolves, Life Won't Wait, and the second self-titled, or "Rancid 2000" as it's often known. Everything else after that sucked. Still, four (by my estimation) great, and I mean great, records is really something. There are no bad songs on those records (well, there is one, but I will get to it, and it's only lyrically bad). Fucking gold.

I was listening to Let's Go this morning and reveled in Tim's hatred of the police, listening to him singing in "Harry Bridges" about how "Bloody Thursday was July 5th, the pigs killed 3 workers, Harry Bridges grabbed the mic," and certainly best of all, when "every single cop got a bullet in the head" in "Sidekick." Even Lars gets in on the action, telling us about Mary being "out the door with a loaded .44 in her hand, shooting down the law that shot down her dear departed man." Fuck pigs, yes, fuck them all to hell.

It was bad enough to find out the man is a Christian (that's the one bad song I was referencing above, "Who Would've Thought" from Life Won't Wait - it's about him "finding god" or whatever bullshit. Unfortunately, I am not able to locate the interview in which I read that at this time.) but now he fucking writes songs about the troops. And not in the good way. No no, Tim unequivocally praises them. He's one of those all-too-common people who somehow views soldiers in a morality vacuum, seeing them as simply "doing their job," no questions of wrong or right being asked, never mind answered. Why, here he is, quoted recently in the Navy Times (not kidding):

“Whatever you think of the war — everyone has their own opinions — you’ve got to give respect to the soldiers,” Armstrong says. “I do, big time.”

No, actually, I need give no respect to the soldiers. You see, the reality that no one wants to admit is that THEY ARE THE FUCKING WAR. Yes, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama could have all the plans they want, the Pentagon could draw up all the strategies it could muster and Lockheed Martin could stockpile millions of tons of weapons and munitions, but if no one actually went to fight the war, then there couldn't be one, could there? And seeing that there hasn't been a draft in decades, there is no excuse there. It's a volunteer military. Sure, people get conned into joining. But then they get enthusiastic about shooting whomever crosses their paths and kicking in strangers' doors and screaming at them in a language they do not understand. So, once you've gone and invaded someone's sovereignty for no reason at all, aside from because you elected to do so/were ordered to, you've forfeited all rights to life. As much as I hate to use the war makers' terms, you are then a thief of freedom and liberty and the people whose land you are invading and occupying, the ones whom you are terrorizing, they have a right to resist and expel you by any means available to them. Especially now! There is NO MISUNDERSTANDING about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are not popular wars. All that shit about 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden and whatever else is a bunch of garbage. None of that has anything to do with what's going on in those countries and no one even bothers to claim it does any longer.

Simply put, you are no hero while you are there unless you turn your weapons back on your own side, absolutely refuse to participate regardless of the consequences to yourself or somehow manage to perform a substantial subversive function, like the tragically foolish traitor to the imperialist cause, Bradley Manning.

All corporations and government agencies involved with the BP oil disaster are to blame

It's all part of that tired old story where money and the unrestrained pursuit of it trumps whatever logic, caution and concern may be present. I will give you the absolute best part of this post first:

The rig’s [Deepwater Horizon, the one that was pumping oil out of that hole in the ocean and then blew up] “spill response plan,” provided to The Times, includes a Web link for a contractor that goes to an Asian shopping Web site and also mentions the importance of protecting walruses, seals and sea lions, none of which inhabit the area of drilling. The agency [Minerals Management Service] approved the plan.

Amazing. Nothing short of amazing. If that is not indicative of a broken, useless government, then nothing is.

Anyway, here are some more highlights:

Deepwater oil production in the gulf, which started in 1979 but expanded much faster in the mid-1990s with new technology and federal incentives, is governed as much by exceptions to rules as by the rules themselves.

Under a process called “alternative compliance,” much of the technology used on deepwater rigs has been approved piecemeal, with regulators cooperating with industry groups to make small adjustments to guidelines that were drawn up decades ago for shallow-water drilling...

“The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations,” Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom of the Coast Guard, who inspects the rigs, said last month at a hearing.

As a result, deepwater rigs operate under an ad hoc system of exceptions. The deeper the water, the further the exceptions stretch, not just from federal guidelines but also often from company policy.

So, for example, when BP officials first set their sights on extracting the oily riches under what is known as Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico, they asked for and received permission from federal regulators to exempt the drilling project from federal law that requires a rigorous type of environmental review, internal documents and federal records indicate...

As BP engineers planned to set certain pipes and casings for lining the well in place in the ocean floor, they had to get permission from company managers to use riskier equipment because that equipment deviated from the company’s own design and safety policies, according to internal BP documents obtained by The New York Times...

Its [the Mineral Management Service] safety inspections usually consist of helicopter visits to offshore rigs to sift through company reports of self-administered tests.

Even Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, who oversees the minerals agency, has said that oil companies have a history of “running the show” at the agency, a problem he has vowed to correct...

On the Deepwater Horizon, for example, the minerals agency approved a drilling plan for BP that cited the “worst case” for a blowout as one that might produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day, federal records show. But the agency did not require the rig to create a response plan for such a situation.

If a blowout were to occur, BP said in its plan, the first choice would be to use a containment dome to capture the leaking oil. But regulators did not require that a containment dome be kept on the rig to speed the response to a spill. After the rig explosion, BP took two weeks to build one on shore and three days to ship it out to sea before it was lowered over the gushing pipe on May 7. It did not work...

More broadly, regulators have not required technology and strategies for dealing with deepwater spills to be improved.

Engineers trying to control the blowout are using the same tactics they used in 1979 when the Ixtoc I well blew up in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico. In the earlier blowout, they first tried lowering a containment dome over the leak. When that failed, they unsuccessfully tried to inject golf balls and other material in a move called a junk shot, which was also tried and abandoned for the Deepwater Horizon...

Questions of oversight also came up in the New Orleans hearings last month. For example, Michael J. Saucier, an official with the Minerals Management Service, said that his agency “highly encouraged” — but did not require — companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

“Highly encourage?” Captain Nguyen of the Coast Guard asked. “How does that translate to enforcement?”

“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier answered...

As early as June 2009, BP engineers had expressed concerns in internal documents about using certain casings for the well because they violated the company’s safety and design guidelines. But they proceeded with those casings...

More than five weeks before disaster, the rig was hit by several sudden pulsations of gas called “kicks” and a pipe had become stuck in the well. The blowout preventer, designed to seal the well in an emergency, had been discovered to be leaking fluids at least three times.

Dealing with these problems required teamwork, a challenge to the throng of different companies with responsibilities on the rig. Of the 126 people present on the day of the explosion, only eight were employees of BP. The interests of the workers did not always align.

Look at this raw display of people's pursuit of money literally producing this catastrophe:

In testimony to government investigators, rig workers repeatedly described a “natural conflict” between BP, which can make more money by completing drilling jobs quickly, and Transocean, which receives a leasing fee from BP every day that it continues drilling.

Halliburton was also on hand to provide cementing services, while a subsidiary monitored various drilling fluids. A different company provided drilling fluid systems, another provided technicians to operate the remote-control vehicles that are they eyes of the rig crew deep underwater, and yet another provided the well casing.

Amid this tangle of overlapping authority and competing interests, no one was solely responsible for ensuring the rig’s safety, and communication was a constant challenge...

BP had fallen behind schedule and over budget, paying roughly $500,000 a day to lease the rig from Transocean. The rig was 43 days late for starting a new drilling job for BP by the day of the explosion, a delay that had already cost the company more than $21 million.

With the clock ticking, bad decisions went unchecked, warning signs went unheeded and small lapses compounded.

On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP’s use of cement “was against our best practices.”

An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a “severe” gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.

Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing.

Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer.

What a clear case that this was entirely preventable (even once the hole had already been drilled) and resulted purely from a thorough lack of concern and a pervasive failure to hold anyone accountable for more than minimal safety standards.

More:

About 10 hours before the explosion, the challenges of trying to keep the pressure in the well under control led to an argument among the workers about how best to finish the well and move the rig to the next site.

Douglas Brown, a Transocean mechanic on the rig, told investigators that an unnamed BP official whom he called “the company man” had instructed rig workers to execute a new plan for removing the riser and sealing the well. Mr. Brown testified that workers thought the plan was too risky. But he could not hear details of the argument that ensued.

“The company man was basically saying, ‘Well, this is how it’s going to be,’ ” Mr. Brown told investigators at a hearing on May 26 near New Orleans, adding that the Transocean rig workers “reluctantly agreed.”

Finally, it's a bit saddening that Obama is so beholden to business interests. Not that it's surprising; he is a president after all. It's just that I've never seen anything of this magnitude before and with someone who's supposed to be all about change and difference and newness and all that in office, I would like for him to do something new instead of trying to keep everything cool. He should be ripping people's heads off, not silencing Ken Salazar:

But the partnership between BP and the government has strained along with the failure of efforts to plug the well. Mr. Salazar, for example, assured the public on May 2 that the administration was keeping its “boot on the neck” of BP. Next he was being publicly chastised by President Obama for using antagonistic language.

I wish someone had a boot on BP's neck. But no one does. And no one will. They are part of our money-theistic religion and are therefore sacrosanct.

The whole story is definitely worth reading.

Right on, Bob Herbert

Bob is my new favorite person at the New York Times. He seems way more "left" than the most of the rest of their people, and is very frank. All of which means he is a real, thinking person who says what he means and what he believes. He doesn't seem like a bullshitter.

He wrote this mostly great op-ed piece on Memorial Day:

If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

YES, fucking YES. Why can't people get that? What the hell business do you have drilling a mile under the sea (assuming that people have a "right" to extract petroleum in the first place, which they don't) when you have absolutely no plan in place in the event of a ruptured pipe, aside from drilling a new well? So many people buy into that industry/business/capital worshipping bullshit where people can do whatever they want in the interest of "progress" and profit.

Some of the rest of it is straight-up liberal and oddly patriotic, but I guess you have to do that shit to get a job there and keep it. They aren't going to publish things that I typically write here, for sure. They've got an agenda, and it is not the same as mine. But the editorial board does seem to allow people to deviate from it, to an extent.

Read on:

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

And, by the way, we’re still fighting a futile war in Afghanistan that we’ve been fighting with nonstop futility for nearly a decade. (I’m sure the troops saddled with this thankless task were thrilled to see fans and teams demonstrating their undying support for their efforts by wearing fancy baseball caps on Memorial Day.)

For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

BP and the Obama administration have been equally clueless about halting the millions of gallons of oil that have flowed into the gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion more than a month ago.

It's nice to see someone hitting at Obama who isn't some conservative piece of shit who will take any chance they can get to take a dump on him, just because he's not conservative, and is black.

Bob Herbert, I will be on a team with him any day. Hell yes, Bob.

One reason why this form of government is untenable

This is a from a New York Times article about hicks (who seem to comprise well over half the national population) fearing that Big Guvment or Uncle Scam or black people or immigrants or the ZOG or whatever will take their guns away:

That Mr. Obama signed legislation allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak trains should not be seen as respect for the Second Amendment, Mr. LaPierre said. The two measures had been attached as amendments to larger pieces of legislation — a bill cracking down on credit card companies and a transportation appropriations bill, respectively — that the president wanted passed, Mr. LaPierre said.

Ok, so it's a problem that guns are permitted in national parks, definitely. BUT THAT THE FUCKING LAW CAME ATTACHED TO CREDIT CARD LEGISLATION? What the fuck. You hear about "pork" and "pork barrel legislation" all the time, but holy shit, if this isn't some next level shit. Legislators attach just about anything they want to a wholly unrelated bill, and there it goes, into law. Even if you believe in the concepts of government and nation states and so on, what kind of way is that to conduct legislative business in one?

Wow. Just wow.

The people who make your decisions

That's Lawrence Summers, President Obama's chief economic advisor. He's a powerful guy. He moves the world in ways that are hard to grasp.

He also used to be the president of Harvard, a few years back. Perhaps he still would be, had he been more reserved in expressing opinions on certain matters. That's a pretty good gig. Maybe he would have left eventually to join the Obama administration. Also seems like a good job to have, if you are of that persuasion. He used to work for Clinton, too, so he is obviously of that persuasion. President of Harvard though, man, that is a prestigious post. You would imagine that's the kind of thing you want to really hold onto and only resign when you are about to get fired. Getting fired from your post as the president of Harvard is basically the antithesis of prestige.

Summers though, I guess he's one of those people who just doesn't understand why anyone would have a problem with what he thinks or says. Cause to him, what he thinks is fact and truth. He's just telling it like it is, basically. He sees reality, and fuck the liberal softies who can't take it. Or at least fuck them until your job is on the line.

At an economic conference in January, 2005, Summers gave an address on the underrepresentation of women in various science and math professions. Some of his ideas look at this discrepancy through a biological lens:

''In the special case of science and engineering," he continued, ''there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination."

He also made it clear he knew he was bucking conventional wisdom, saying he wanted to offer hypotheses ''without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality."

Intrinsic aptitude. It's more a concern of "intrinsic aptitude" over the "lesser factors" of socialization and discrimination. Overall, women don't have what it takes to be good chemists or engineers or whatever.

Be sure not to miss his appeals to have a real discussion, unbound by the constraints of p.c. fascism and to look through the smokescreens that those namby pamby liberals put up about how everyone is equal. This is Harvard, not fucking Woodstock.

In his comments on the differences between the abilities of men and women, Summers offered a calculation based on research presented at the conference, arguing that if half as many women as men score in the top 5 percent of 12th-grade math and science tests, then far fewer women will rise to the highest level of math and science.

''If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about . . . then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley," there will be more men than women with those attributes.

Hey man, women just don't do well in math and science, period. You can see it in high school. What do you expect? Of course they won't be able to cut it as scientists or mathematicians. Their lower scores have nothing to do with socialization as children, they have nothing to do with discrimination at the hands of teachers, they have nothing to do with discouragement from parents, and no possible connection to how tests are written and conducted. They're just not smart like that. They can do other stuff though, probably.

And no, Karl Marx, hiring discrimination is not a factor either:

As for discrimination, he was far more skeptical -- applying economic theory to make his point. "If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap."

Stop getting down on him, Joe McCarthy of the liberals. Give him a break! Then-president Summers is a friend of all the oppressed, seeing the pervasive discrimination people of all stripes suffer:

But during the same speech, Summers also said, "The data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking ... That white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture."

Wow.

Unfortunately, the transcript of his speech is no longer accessible, but both Inside Higher Ed and the Boston Globe have articles that reproduce the most salient points of his address.

Sarah Palin's book

I'm sure lots of fools who believe in "rugged individualism" and routinely ignore whatever they don't like to create their own realities in their minds will eat it up.

The article seems long, but it's a quick, fun read in that "holy shit" kind of way. Each analysis will leave you wondering what else she wrote that could be on the same level as what you've just read.

Fuckin a man, people are so stupid. What a fucking pathetic culture we have.

FACT CHECK: Palin's book goes rogue on some facts

WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time. Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

A look at some of her statements in "Going Rogue," obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Tuesday:

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PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking "only" for reasonably priced rooms and not "often" going for the "high-end, robe-and-slippers" hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City's Central Park for a five-hour women's leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children's travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.

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PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.

She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife and $30 from a state representative in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers' offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she gave a comparative sum to charity.

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PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, "you'll have to be brave enough to fail."

THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama's stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin's views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain's vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said "taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street." A week later, she said "ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being "instrumental in bringing folks together" to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said "it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in."

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PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and "showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all."

THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.

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PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

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PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own "revolving door" issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.

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PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free — this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.

THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family's $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.

She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.

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PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people's electricity bills to "skyrocket."

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.

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PALIN: Welcomes last year's Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation's largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she'd had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court's ruling went "in favor of the people." Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.

THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs' lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was "extremely disappointed." She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. "It's tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision," she said, noting many had died "while waiting for justice."

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PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don't want "help" from government busybodies.

THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.

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PALIN: Says she tried to talk about national security and energy independence in her interview with Vogue magazine but the interviewer wanted her to pivot from hydropower to high fashion.

THE FACTS are somewhat in dispute. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin did not go on about hydropower. "She just kept talking about drilling for oil."

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PALIN: "Was it ambition? I didn't think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons." Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.

THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But "Going Rogue" has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.

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AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report.

Fucking kill me

Jay-z needs to make a second version of "D.O.A." which would involve him killing America. Fuck this place, holy shit. It is so full up of thoughtless idiots who will believe anything they hear on the radio, see on TV or "read" on the internet on whatever stupid fucking message boards or blogs they frequent. They are hateful, bigoted, racist, anti-intellectual and are fraught with anxiety that big guvmint is always around the corner coming to get them and take away all their "rights." What these jackasses systematically fail to see, much to the delight of those who use them for political gain, is that THEY ARE ON THE SAME SIDE AS THE PEOPLE RUNNING THE COUNTRY. They all want the same fucking things - God, money, black people in jail, women in the back. Just fools in the game of division.

Anyway, here's what's going on. A bunch of assholes are running around the country stirring up this week's blind, pointless jingoistic hatred in the name of the "Tea Party Express." Remember that old woman at a McCain campaign rally last year who said she couldn't trust Obama because he's an Arab? I bet she's around. Here are some choice quotes:

• Under a setting sun on the steps of the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, Johns says: "Our men and women took an oath when they put on the uniform to defend and protect this country from enemies both foreign and domestic. I think we've got some domestic enemies in the White House."
• "The men and women in our military didn't fight and die for this country for a communist in the White House," she says, and the crowd erupts in a chant of "U-S-A, U-S-A!"
• Williams is the showman of the bunch. His signature line when he gets the mic goes like this: "You can have our country when you pry it from our ... cold ... dead ... fingers!" Again the crowd erupts.
• As the tour moves on, Nazi imagery becomes more prominent -- and sometimes confused. One sign at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, has Obama's portrait sandwiched between pictures of Adolf Hitler and communist philosopher Karl Marx. In Canton,Ohio, Obama and Hitler adorn a sign reading "Hitler made great speeches, too."
• No one on the tea party express seems concerned with the vocal fringe of the crowds that come with offensive signs -- besides Nazi imagery, a poster of Obama as an African witch doctor has become popular -- or the numerous conspiracy theories that float around most tea parties.
• In Battle Creek, Michigan, a woman in her 60s says, "I really don't want to be a guinea pig for the experiment they have with the population control." In Canton, Ohio, a woman argues with an Obama supporter: "He's going after our kids to try to indoctrinate them into a national defense army."

This is the kind of shit that makes me wish I were dead. That's it.

Racism just isn't racist anymore

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" has apologized, saying he's not a racist.

Officer Justin Barrett told a Boston television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail.

"I regret that I used such words," Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB-TV. "I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist."

...In Barrett's e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station's Web site, he declared that if he had "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance."

Barrett used the "jungle monkey" phrase four times, three times referring to Gates and once referring to Abraham's writing as "jungle monkey gibberish."

It's getting so hard to be racist these days. Nobody's racist anymore. All these people who publicly say and do things that used to be considered racist, like the above pig, like Don Imus, like the pig who arrested Gates, or pigs who use the letter "N" to denote black people's race on traffic tickets, they just aren't racist now. Sure, they hate black people and everything, fuck with them based on their skin color, but I guess they just don't mean it. Maybe they're accidental racists. Unwilling racists.

Anyway, when I call someone a banana-eating jungle monkey, I want them to be offended, in a serious way. And they used to be. Unfortunately, they won't anymore, since it's no longer a racist term. I get it all the time these days. When I go out to eat, the person waiting on me often says, "Do you know what you'd like to order, you banana-eating jungle monkey?" When the UPS guy comes to our door, he frequently tells me, "Hey banana-eating jungle monkey, I've got a package for you." At the health food store, where they know me, most of the staff greets me with, "Hello banana-eating jungle monkey, how are you today?" And I'm not even black. I get it all the time though, you know? What a bummer.

What's it gonna take? I think we need new terms. The old ones are played out and have long since lost their sharp edge due to constant use. Who would have thought that banana-eating jungle monkey would become common, non-offensive parlance? I guess everything changes with time. It's like how "bad" started to mean "really awesome" in the 1960s.

I despise your killing and raping...You're...despicable

More war. For nothing. Fight and fight. Attack. Return the attack. Go nowhere. No progress. Just moving sideways. Domination. New masters. Old masters return. No one wins. Same process, new participants. Ad nauseam. Ad annihilation.

I fucking hate this country

Straight up. Fuck this place.

People in general are out of their minds, on a species level, but some of us actually try to rein it in. Not so in so many places, such as Louisville, Kentucky.

Ken Pagano, the pastor of the New Bethel Church here, is passionate about gun rights. He shoots regularly at the local firing range, and his sermon two weeks ago was on “God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry.” And on Saturday night, he is inviting his congregation of 150 and others to wear or carry their firearms into the sanctuary to “celebrate our rights as Americans!” as a promotional flier for the “open carry celebration” puts it.

“God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” Mr. Pagano, 49, said Wednesday in the small brick Assembly of God church, where a large wooden cross hung over the altar and two American flags jutted from side walls. “I don’t see any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”

Right on, Ken. God and guns. Fucking fantastic. Go America. Hell fuckin yeah bro. Right on. Right fucking on. Bang bang - is that the sound of two knees hitting the ground or two bullets leaving the barrel? Is there a difference?

Fuck this place. Fuck everyone's shitty, empty religion. I don't care what it is, fuck it. It's stupid and fake. Whatever god you worship doesn't exist, unless you're a staunch capitalist, cause money surely exists. Fuck everyone's stubborn refusal to think.

They want their guns in church. Isn't that supposed to be their refuge, their time to be the flock of sheep to their boundlessly loving shepherd?

Uh oh - looks like Big Brother is comin for ya Jethro! Better hide the guns in the pig feed!

Arkansas and Georgia recently rejected efforts to allow people to carry concealed weapons in church. Watching the debate in Arkansas was John Phillips, pastor of the Central Church of Christ in Little Rock. In 1986, Mr. Phillips was preaching in a different church there when a gunman shot him and a parishioner. Both survived, but Mr. Phillips, 51, still has a bullet lodged in his spine.

In a telephone interview, he said he found the idea of “packing in the pew” abhorrent.

“There is a movement afoot across the nation, with the gun lobby pushing the envelope, trying to allow concealed weapons to be carried in places where they used to be prohibited — churches, schools, bars,” Mr. Phillips said.

What does he know? If everyone else had guns, they could have shot the guy who shot him! That bullet in his spine just makes for cooler x-rays. But no, prohibition is the PROBLEM, don't you see? Of course we need more guns in schools and bars. Definitely, what a great idea. Yes, guns in bars. I'm all for it. The quicker to weed us out. Guns wherever we want them - hospitals, nursery schools, roller coasters, mental hospitals, airplanes, comic book conventions, wherever. I WANT MY FUCKING GUN, DON'T YOU GET IT??????

And no, I'm not a pacifist either. It's just that I'm not a single issue lunatic who thinks that guns = freedom, that there is no better measure.

We live in a backwards country overflowing with dumb hicks who believe and fear things like the GUVMENT CUMMIN TO TAKE MUH GUNS AWAY. That's your fucking priority? THAT'S your concern? THAT'S your big issue? Fucking GUN CONFISCATION? THAT'S what really troubles you in the grand scheme of the world? Fuck. How could I ever fit in a place like this. I can't, that's how. Cause I'm an alien.

Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands

As opposed to a few years back, when they were sent by the U.S. and put into Taliban hands. The article completely ignores that point, that Americans are fighting a force that the CIA funded, armed and trained. Fucking brilliant. Forget the past, they tell us every day. But remember the parts that serve them well, like 9/11. That one, you're supposed to never forget. You know? As though they'd let you forget anyway.

From the New York Times today:

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

Haha, pretty good contribution to the spectacle.

They won't leave Assata alone

I don't really get it. I suppose it's a combination of patriotism, the blind worship of police, racism, the hatred of all things radical, sexism, and some other things. Whatever the case, there are some (maybe more?) people who are so fucking fervent about Assata Shakur being recaptured. She's been in Cuba for twenty-five years. A few years back, in 2005, the state of New Jersey upped the reward for her capture to $1 million. The same day, the FBI put her on a "domestic terrorist watch list." Domestic terrorist. Living in Cuba since 1984/85. Convicted of shooting a cop. Lots of people shoot cops, but I don't think any of them has ever been deemed a terrorist before.

So now some people, the types who subscribe to/create/maintain the attitudes I mentioned at the top of this post, like politicians and police, are saying that if Barack Obama wants to cool things out with Cuba, then he has to arrange to have Assata sent back here. As usual, these people have media outlets doing their work for them.

This particularly troubling article, written by a man who is evidently quite conservative and at a minimum, fairly racist, does so much vile propagandizing for the masters. It's filled with so many problems. It's hard to determine where to start. Here are a few:

• "Then, four years ago, the State Police increased the American bounty on her once-Afro'd head to $1 million..."


• "Chesimard has reared her head now and then -- at times, it seems, to thumb her nose at the United States -- offering interviews to Newsday, among others, and writing books." - Reared her head? Why is she thumbing her nose by talking? I'm sure Newsday had a real black liberation agenda in mind when they put that piece together.


• "Authorites eluded convictions in several crimes in the early 1970s, including shootings, a bank holdup and a hand-grenade attempt that blew up a police car." - I'm pretty sure "eluded" is not really the right word choice for what he's trying to say, but his point is fucked nonetheless: this guy writes like he knows better than anyone, like he was there. They are not accusations, but "crimes" that she got away with. And what the hell is "a hand-grenade attempt that blew up a police car."? This guy cannot get his head around the idea that she didn't do these things.


• "She's been living under political asylum in Cuba the past 35 years. " She wasn't convicted until 1977. That's 32 years ago. Didn't make it to Cuba until 1984 at the earliest.


• "At trial, Harper (cop) said that Foerster (dead cop) reached into the vehicle, pulled out and held up an automatic pistol and ammunition clip, and said 'Jim, look what I found,' while facing Harper at the rear of the vehicle." - Why would someone do that? "Hey, I found some bullets in the car, I'm not gonna pay attention to the people in it for a little bit." That would never happen, unless you were the literal dumbest pig.


• "Harper testified that Acoli shot Foerster with a .38 caliber automatic pistol and then used Foerster's own gun to 'execute him.'" Harper also later testified that he lied.


• "Chesimard was caught five miles down the road across from the Joyce Kilmer Service area." - He doesn't tell you the part that she was near death in the back seat of the car, having been shot in the back.


• "Under cross-examination, Shakur was unable to explain how three clips of ammunition and 16 live shells had gotten into her shoulder bag." - That's a tough case to crack, huh?

Then the fool blows his case at the end by having to admit a fact - "Jurors convicted Chesimard as an accomplice in the murders of both Foerster and Shakur -- more than enough for the state of New Jersey, which penalizes such convictions with life prison terms." Yup. She got life for being at the scene. Not for doing anything.
Here are some points to consider, as related by one of her lawyers, Evelyn Williams:

The forensic evidence examined by both the New Jersey crime laboratory in Trenton, New Jersey and FBI crime laboratories in Washington, D.C. established the following:

1. The finger print analyses of every gun and every piece of ammunition found at the scene showed there were no fingerprints of Assata found on any of them. (The official analyses admitted into evidence) 

2. Neutron Activation Analysis taken immediately after Assata was taken to the hospital that night showed there was no gun power residue on her hands. Effectively refuting the possibility that she had fired a gun. (The official analyses were admitted into evidence) 

3. As a result of the bullet Harper shot under her armpit, while her arms were raised in, her median nerve was severed, immediately paralyzing her entire right arm, shattering her clavicle, and lodging in her chest so close to her heart that an operation to remove it was not feasible. A neurologist testified to that fact at the trial.

4. A pathologist testified that “There is no conceivable way that the bullet could have traveled over to the clavicle if her arm was down. That trajectory is impossible.”

5. A surgeon testified that “it was anatomically necessary that both arms be in the air for Ms. Chesimard to have received the wounds she did.”The state offered no expert witnesses to refute this medical testimony.

6. Photographs depicting the gunshot entry wound under her armpit and the entry would of the bullet Harper shot into her back were admitted into evidence during the trial.

The entire document is too long to post here, at three or four pages, but is totally worth a read. If nothing else, it can give you counterpoints, SOME kind of balance against this sensational trash making her out to be some kind of warlord or whatever.
She's in Cuba. She's been there for a long time. The Cuban government welcomes her and provides her with protection. If she did it, why would she still be saying that she didn't?

Bill Clinton - piece of shit

Lots of liberals and Democrats and whomever else love to remember Bill Clinton as a great guy, a really well-meaning president, and characterize his administration as a progressive one that will always be worthy of praise. Fuck that.

The Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, defines marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman, and provides that states need not recognize the marriage of a same sex couple from another state.

These people are all the same.

Do you have a problem with welfare?

I do. Those lazy welfare cheats get too much of your paycheck, huh? Yeah. Sitting around all day, doing nothing, getting paid for it. They live better than you and me man, I tell ya. They are so irresponsible. They just expect people to hand them money. Even worse, they're right! They make bad decision after bad decision and get rewarded for it. It's so insulting. Count the numbers.

Citi - $45 billion

AIG - $170 billion (some older articles reference $85 billion, but that was just round one)

Wells Fargo - $25 billion

Bank of America - $45 billion

JP Morgan Chase - $25 billion

 

$310 billion, the bulk of it since October. Billions more to come, out of that $787 billion bailout fund. What do people get a year? Real people, people on government aid because they don't have money, because they can't afford food, because they can't find jobs, because there simply are no jobs for them to find? In 2006, the federal government paid out about $20 billion dollars in cash and non-cash benefits through its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program to around two million families. Families, not individuals. Wow, an average of ten thousand dollars a year. Per family. That's some get rich quick shit right there.

Here is where your money really went this year:

Vikram Pandi - Ceo of Citi. He looks happy.

Recent AIG CEO Robert Willumstad, before he was removed by the fed. Looks happy for 114.

John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, with his wife Ruth. They look so happy.

Here's Ken Lewis, head of Bank of America. Nice smile there, yeah?

James "Jamie" Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase. He smiles like Bill Clinton.

For fucking nothing. And no, they don't create jobs. They ship them overseas or mechanize them so they can rake in even more.

This is just what the financial sector got recently. Loads of other corporations, like oil, agribusiness, the auto industry, etc., get constant supplies of money but I don't have time to tend to that now. Later.

Still hoping for that change?

That's cool. Let me know when it comes, k?

A Harvard law professor wrote an opinion piece in today's New York Times on what separates the current and former presidential administrations' handling of their detainees, "enemy combatants," "terrorists," others confined in Guantanamo Bay and those who will find themselves in similar situations. Here are some highlights:

HAS the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay...Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want...

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies...

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

It seems as though president Obama will be taking the route of doing shitty things and not speaking of them. That way, he feels better about himself, more liberals/progressives/civil libertarians will support him and the American image abroad improves, at least for a while. I think that a lot of people really want to believe that this guy is a real departure from the past and have so far convinced themselves that since he speaks differently and chooses to verbally address and engage different agendas than the former president, than he must be. I haven't seen it.

22 years in prison for torching a genetic modification seed lab in Michigan

Yesterday, Marie Mason was put away for almost 22 years for torching a lab that was making crops with altered genes, research almost certainly on the behalf of some agribusiness giant like Monsanto. She's an "eco-terrorist" now. Watch out.

It's funny, cause I would say that the people who would unleash this fake food, these doctored seeds unto the world are terrorizing the environment. It scares the fuck out of me. And they get their ways through fear - they say that we're all gonna starve if they don't get to sell their patented superseeds. They tell us that nature's not good enough. They say we need them to live.

As greenisthenewred points out, four white guys who went around Staten Island the evening of November fourth randomly beating black people, or in one case, someone they thought was black, will only be serving up to 10 years, while another gets 12. From the FBI:

At the plea proceeding, Nicoletti admitted that on Nov. 4, 2008, the night of the presidential election, the defendants decided to assault African-Americans in Staten Island after President Obama was declared the winner of the election. The defendants targeted African-Americans believing that they had voted for President Obama. Nicoletti drove the group to the Park Hill section of Staten Island, a predominantly African-American neighborhood, where they came upon an African-American teenager and assaulted him. Nicoletti struck the teenager with a metal pipe and Garaventa hit him with a collapsible police baton.

Nicoletti then drove to the Port Richmond section of Staten Island, where the defendants assaulted an unidentified African-American man. During that assault, Garaventa tripped the victim and pushed him to the ground.

The third assault was against an individual whom the defendants mistakenly believed was African-American. The plan was for Contreras to hit the victim with the police baton as the defendants drove by him. Instead, Nicoletti deliberately drove his car into the victim’s body. The victim was thrown onto the hood of the car and hit the front windshield, smashing it. The victim was seriously injured and remained in a coma for several weeks after the attack...

“The crimes these defendants have now admitted to were violent assaults that in one case nearly killed a man,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Demarest of the New York Field Office...

You can beat the shit out of people for no reason, you can run people over, you can put someone in a coma, and you will maybe get ten years. You can do things that you believe will likely kill people, you can not care if you kill them, and you won't go away for too long.

Get in the way of corporate earnings and you're through. Especially if you've got principles behind it. The two combined are lethal; they'll punish you so severely for putting principles into practice that legitimately impinge on capital.

These sentences were only three days apart. Pretty good for comparison. Same political climate, both federal crimes.

Also, fuck Mason's ex-husband. That dude ruined so many other people to shave a few years off his own sentence. Yeah, they still put him away. For nine fucking years. Way to go.

#44 - still not my president

Yippitee yay, Barack Obama is following some of the more controversial and less desireable lines of his predecessor. Warrantless wiretaps are still in this season, I guess. As well as continuing to support immunity for the telecommunications conglomerates who allowed the NSA and whomever else to listen to us, to watch us and to read us. Fuck. Change has come.

Haha

"The departing vice president, Dick Cheney, appeared at the ceremony in a wheelchair after suffering a back injury moving the day before and was also booed."

I wish he were in a wheelchair for other reasons, but that will do.

Sarah Palin Pardons Turkey - While others killed behind her

Wonderful.

A new president, new hate unleashed

Here are some hate crimes from around the country in the last four days, all directly in response to people electing Barack Obama as president. Please take note that none of them occurred in the traditional "South." Two in the Northeast, or Up South, and one in Texas, which is its own confusing mess.

Staten Island - a seventeen-year-old young Liberian man was beaten with bats by four white males, in a car, with concealed faces, yelling "Obama" at him.

Waco, Texas - among other things, some white people hung a noose from a tree at Baylor University in response to Barack Obama's win.

Hardwick, New Jersey - some white people burned a six foot cross on a Cuban/Indian family's front lawn, after stealing their homemade celebratory Obama victory banner.

I'm so much more eager and ready to burn this fucking country down than I was a week ago.