With gutless Democrats and a supine Congress, impeachment is going nowhere fast.
But there is activity outside of Washington, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. And the ridiculous is making the best points.
Dan Savage, author of "Savage Love," a sex advice column, and the editor of The Stranger, Seattle's alternative news weekly, has a web site dedicated to ITMFA.
And that stands for “Impeach the Mother Fucker Already”.
Already there are lapel pins, t-shirts, bumper stickers, license plates, etc. all proclaiming ITMFA.
ITMFA won’t bring about the impeachment of George Bush, but if it becomes widespread, it can change the political climate. Ridicule is a powerful weapon.
Just got back from WisCon and 75,000 spam -- well, I exaggerate, but not by much -- and it will take me awhile to get back on track.
But for a complete account of WisCon, I direct you to my wife's May 31st, 2006 recounting on her blog:
http://anghara.livejournal.com/
We had a blast.
In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle crediting Wal-Mart with going green, Mark Morford said something more in line with what I think about the place, except he said it better:
"I do not shop at Wal-Mart. I may never, ever shop at Wal-Mart, given their notoriously horrible labor practices and their brutal business tactics and their effortless murder of all love and hope and joy from the retail experience. They are the George Bushes of the retail world -- drunk with power, cheaply made and full of crap."
I am off to Wiscon. See you all in a few days.
Zacarias Moussaoui has been likened to the Barney Fife of al Qaeda. In prison at the time of the 911 attacks, he is the only one the government managed to put on trial for 911.
Let’s repeat, he was in prison at the time of the attack, so it is hard to make a case that he was responsible. But what the hell, the government decided to try him, and even wanted the death penalty. A bunch of mindless jurors decide to punish him, although they balked at giving him the death penalty.
And now, Osama bin Laden says he had nothing to do with the operation.
Oh, well, at least it's better than invading some country that nothing to do with the operation either. Oh wait, we did that too.
At Freewayblogger.com, they have some very creative ideas.
Two signs on a freeway overpass:
The war is a lie
And you know it
Beside a road;
Support Our Troops
Impeach the murdering bastards
who sent them to die for a pack of lies
On another overpass
We refuse to fight in a war
started by men who
refused to fight in a war
You can join in the fun. All you have to do, the folks at Freewayblogger.com say, is:
1) Put paint on cardboard
2) Put cardboard on freeway
3) Repeat
Take a look:
http://www.freewayblogger.com/
"The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life's polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night?"
Bill Moyers, Baccalaureate Address @ Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
The Evil Editor is a funny guy.
He dissects query letters on his blog with good, if sometimes brutal, humor.
I’m unclear, from my cursory look at his site, whether the queries are for real novels or not. His list of Queued Queries “books whose query letters have been submitted for ridicule, but not yet critiqued” includes a few intriguing titles, e.g.:
Pale Girls Shaped Like Crucifixes
Life, Love and a Polar Bear Tattoo
The House of ‘I
Who is he?
All his profile says is:
Evil Editor
* Gender: male
* Industry: Publishing
* Occupation: Editor
* Location: United States
Worth a look.
The Evil Editor's blog
http://www.evileditor.blogspot.com.
According to Yahoo news, one of today’s top stories is “Britney Spears Stumbles, Nearly Drops Baby.”
Our disaster in Iraq is still killing thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans, the moron in the White House is threatening to drop nukes on Iran, Congress is a cesspool of corruption, the economy is a wreck, our elections were stolen, we are torturing prisoners and smirking about it, global warming is going to fry the planet....
And a top story of the day is “Britney Spears Stumbles, Nearly Drops Baby”?!!!?
Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life here.
Regrets, she has a few
May. 18th, 2006 | 05:49 am
Judith Miller -- the reporter who worked as a pipeline for the White House lies about imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction that helped launch an obscene war – does have one little regret.
She told a couple of Raw Story* reporters that she will always regret that she didn’t report that a White House source told her shortly before 911 that a NSA intelligence report was predicting a large al Qaeda attack, possibly on the continental United States.
“I think everybody knew that an attack was coming ...,” the former New York Times reporter said. “But you know you can only 'cry wolf' within a newspaper... before people start saying ... there she goes -- again!"
Funny, that never bothered her when she was wolfishly reporting on those mythical WMD and other Bush whoppers.
* http://www.rawstory.com/
On her blog, [info]anghara moans about the state of American education because some students didn’t live up to the standards that were around when she was a girl.
There are other high school students, of course. Take these science fair winners for example:
Wolf, a 16-year-old from Allentown, PA, won for her project, "Sleuthing Epicenter Direction from Seismites, Cretaceous Wahweap Formation, Cockscomb Area, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah."
Madhavi Gavini, 16, from Columbus, MS, snagged a scholarship for her "Engineering of a Novel Inhibitor of Biofilm-Encapsulated Pathogens."
John Pease Moore, IV, 18 of Miamisburg, OH, won for his project on, "Development of Fixed and Flapping-wing Surveillance Micro Air Vehicles."
Mary Douglas, 17, and Alison Liu, 16, both from Manhasset High School, Manhasset, NY, received a top team project award for their project” "The Effects of CNS Stimulants and SSRIs on the Formation of Conditioned Long Term Memory and Learning Behaviors in Sleep Deprived Wildtype Drosophila melanogaster."
But then, we all get nostalgic for a past that never really existed.
Admit it. The first thing you do when you go to someone's house is to check out their bookshelves.
Now you can do the same thing, virtually, before you go there, or even if you are never invited -- if they have put their collection online at http://www.librarything.com/.
From their home page:
Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. Because everyone else is doing it too, LibraryThing connects you with people who read the same things, and gives you great recommendations.
* Rapidly searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 45 other world libraries.
* Show it or keep it private. Show your books on your blog too.
* Get recommendations. Connect to people with all your obscure stuff.
* Tag your books as on Del.icio.us and Flickr (eg., wwii, magical realism, vampires, theology, dogs, philosophy of science).
* Export your data. Import from almost anywhere too.
"Both entrancing and evil," says a user.
How can any book lover resist?
Steve Chapman of the Baltimore Sun says that the fact that Bush and NSA are spying on everyone in the country means that privacy is a thing of the past. “Thanks to this program, there is no longer an impermeable barrier around your personal zone," he says.
"It's more like a screen door on a submarine.”
I was a newspaperman when newspapers were semi legitimate, semi serious. Most of the time they actually covered important news. Infotainment was an oddity, not the only way that “news” was covered.
How times have changed. The worst of the changes came when Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a giveaway to giant media companies which has resulted in six or seven corporations owning nearly all the media, all the sources we get our news from.
The worst of the lot is Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which serves up of propaganda disguised as news. For example:
A recent poll showed that less than 1% of Fox viewers believed that our elections were stolen. That compares to CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%.
Since our elections were stolen, the ability of Fox to hide the truth is astounding.
Of all the incredibly stupid statements that U.S. President Bush has said, one stands out because of its immutable truth –
“Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we.” – George W. Bush
We are like frogs in hot water, slowly being boiled to death while we watch TV and worry about Paris Hilton‘s new video game or O.J. Simpson joking about his getaway car.
Bush and his neocon puppet masters are destroying our democracy, and we don’t care.
One poll, for example, claims that a vast majority of Americans aren’t worried that the NSA is spying on millions of us. They’re just protecting us from the bad guys, you see
Anyone who believes that might be interested in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn.
The U.S. House and Senate have agreed on a really great new tax cut bill.
Middle-income households will get an average tax cut of $20.
Households with incomes over $1 million will get an average tax cut of $42,000.
"One of the things I'm most often asked is why the abortion and unintended pregnancy rates are so much lower in Europe. People talk about the easy access to contraception there, but I think it's really a matter of the underlying social norms.
“In Europe, these things are in the open, and the only issue is to be careful. Here in the U.S., people are still arguing about whether it's O.K. to have sex."
Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnacy
She doesn't understand. In the U.S. sex is OK as long as a corporation profits -- e.g. sexy commercials -- otherwise, it's suspect.
USA Today says, “Vice President Dick Cheney rightly took Russian President Vladimir Putin to task for backsliding on democracy.”
“Rightly?”
This from an administration that stole the American elections – twice?
Of course, we did let them get away with it. So naturally, they feel they can do anything they want, say anything they want, forever.
I was going to say, 'for the rest of their term.' But if they decide that the War on Terrorism requires that they stay in office.....? Well, would they?
And if they did, would we finally get upset?
Danny Schechter in a slightly hopeful piece on changes in the media notes that there may be 51 million blogs now in existence.
“A new one is said to come online every second. This is the most rapid adoption of a new media platform in history, perhaps since the original Tower of Babble in ancient Iraq. There are so many blogs in Iran that many young people refer to their country as ‘blogostan.’ ”
"I haven't been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children's literature," Beverly Cleary says. "Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them."
Cleary, 90, is the author of the popular "Ramona Quimby" children's book series, She is taking her time in approving the script for the first Ramona movie to make sure her beloved character:
"doesn't turn into a plastic miniature inside a kid's fast-food restaurant meal."
I was born during the Depression, was a child during World War II, and came to manhood in the aftermath. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Considering the state of the country today, the "best of times" prevails in my memories.
Oh, there was plenty of material for the "worst of times" scenario. The Depression and World War II don't fit anybody's idea of Paradise. We went straight from World War II to the Cold War, and several hot wars, starting with Korea. The misguided, misbegotten, cynical Cold War was savagely fought on all fronts, with McCarthyism for spice. Racism was more overt than it is today, and even officially sanctioned in most of the South. There were attempts to put women, who had made great gains during the war, when men were scarce, back into their place.
But yet, but yet...
There was still the sense that America was the "city upon a hill," in the immortal phrase of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the end of World War II we were almost universally admired; a beacon of light for all the world.
Rest at: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/rdeck062.html
Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch.com. reports on signs he saw at a giant anti-war march in New York City – ( 300,000 demonstrators that the corporate media virtually ignored). Among them:
"One Nation under Surveillance"
"Drop Bush, Not Bombs."
"No Pro-Life in Iraq."
"1 was too many, 2400 is enough!
"How Many Lives per Gallon?"
And my favorite:
"War is terrorism with a bigger budget"
The Feds are upset, but Nevadans are going to be able to buy prescription drugs from Canada over the Internet at a state Web site.
Prescription drugs are cheaper in Canada, of course, since the government isn’t in league with the drug companies to the degree that Washington is.
The Feds are not happy.
The Cold War was followed by the War on Drugs, which was followed by the War on Terrorism, all part of the march from democracy to a form of totalitarianism.
But there is no outrage. The public is apathetic, the media indifferent, Congress impotent, Republicans blindly supportive, and the Democrats whimpering in bunkers.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Kinky Friedman is an original. The singer, songwriter, novelist, is a master of one-liners, which is evident in his race as an independent candidate for governor in Texas. One example:
"Texas: 50th in education, first in executions... how's that working for you?"
At last, someone was talking sense about drugs. Mexico was going to decriminalize them.
A law passed by the Mexican Congress would have eliminated criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of heroin, methamphetamines and PCP, as well as marijuana and cocaine.
But under pressure from the United States, which has an absolutely insane anti-drug policy, Mexican President Vicente Fox refused to sign it.
The US ‘War on Drugs” has made a medical problem into a law enforcement problem. The “war” costs billions of dollars, puts hundreds of thousands of people, mostly blacks and minorities, of course, in prison, and has resulted in the destruction of the Bill of Rights.
The US couldn’t have a border country, treating drugs sanely. It would make us look bad.
An average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food.
We use the fossil fuel in the process of producing, processing, packaging, and transporting the food from the farm to us.
If you want to use less fossil fuel so that maybe we can keep the world from burning up from global warming – well, at least slowing down the process –the best thing to do is buy locally grown organic food.
Tastes better and it’s better for you, too.
Comedian Stephen Colbert told the truth at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. President Bush and the lapdog reporters were not amused.
During his speech, Colbert complained that he was surrounded “by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News.” Fox, he explained, “believes in presenting both sides – the president's side and the vice president's side."
He noted that some polls say that Bush has a 32% approval rating. “But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”