POLITICS- Obama's War on Privacy

Just another reminder to any of you still naive enough to think that there is really any difference in the political parties, or that either of them are interested in freedom, civil liberties, or privacy. The Obama administration is asking that the FBI have access to your browser history, email history, and even when you send and receive email without having to get a court order! So much for the Democrats protecting civil liberties. Orwell's book is a tired analogy, but that doesn't mean that it isn't frighteningly prophetic or perfectly apt. Bit by bit the government is nibbling away at any privacy you might have left. Doesn't matter if it's the Republicans or Democrats in office, the government is in the business of growing like a malignancy and metastasizing into every part of your life.

POLITICS- Rush Limbaugh hates America.

In case you had any doubt that the right wing has no love for this country except when they can control it, and in case you have any incredulity left as to how far the right wing is willing to fall into the depths of stupidity- get this: Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt are calling for a boycott of General Motors! Plainly their opinion is, “Screw America, Screw the elected government, screw our fellow American workers, and screw everybody who isn’t a mindless zombie follower of whatever we decide is conservative in this country.” Hard to believe that just a few short months ago these heinous trolls were calling anybody who didn’t pledge unconditional fealty to a president (who started two wars, sat numbly for minutes after being told of 9/11, instituted rules allowing the government to spy on and incarcerate American citizens without due process, and presided over the ruining of the economy) un-American and un-patriotic! Now JUST because the guy trying to save the American auto industry is on the other side politically they want to wreck the country. (Yeah, JUST. If you think Rush Limbaugh gives a damn about socialism for any reason other than that he backed the other horse then you believe it when fat, rich, white guys tell you that fat, rich, white guys aren’t the problem. Or that the Republican party cares anything about Christianity even though they did nothing but pay lip service to that constituency the whole time they were in power. The man, and obviously the party, has no scruples!)

It was OK when Bush handed out hundreds of billions to bankers with no strings attached even though they had ruined the economy, and millions of American's 401Ks in the process. But let Obama try to save GM by winding up with a controlling share for a few years in the hope that the company can pull itself out of their current troubles and that Americans might even be able to recoup their investment while keeping their jobs and Rush is ready to boycott an American company owned by the taxpayers to make sure it doesn't work. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Face it Dittoheads, Rush would rather you all starve than see Obama do anything good for the country.

POLITICS- Dejon Mustard

Cummon. Is this the best the party of William Buckley can do nowadays? You’ve convinced the majority of Americans that you are completely incompetent. Are you not willing to stop until you’ve convinced everyone but your idiotic followers that you have gone full retard? You never go full retard! But there is no way else to interpret this

“On the May 7 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Steyn said of Obama's condiment selection: "He's amazing, Obama. This coverage -- he's a regular guy. He eats a hamburger with Dijon mustard -- Dijon mustard. John Kerry couldn't get away with that stuff, but he makes it seem like just like a regular thing to do. Now there's -- I see that some of the left-wing commentators are saying, 'Why are people making a fuss about the Dijon mustard?' but that's just an example of the way Obama is able to enlighten us."

[I pause here to say that (a) no left-wing commentator that I am aware of has said this and (b) how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that you can be "enlightened" by mustard? But this answer to the latter is obviously "as stupid as this guy".]

Later in the program, Steyn stated: "I deeply resent Barack Obama crashing in as the Grey Poupon spokesperson, because that has been the lifesaver for non-American voiceover artists in this country for years -- getting the gig doing the Grey Poupon voiceover." He added: "[I]f you can't outsource Grey Poupon to foreigners, what can you outsource? And instead now he's apparently the big Grey Poupon spokesperson, putting it all -- putting it all over his hamburger. Barack Obama -- that was -- what was that? That was yesterday, Barack Obama had a hamburger. I don't know what he may do today to prove -- to pass for human."

So Obama isn’t human because he likes mustard that isn’t pure yellow- like Rush Limbaugh and his stooges- (Dijon mustard- the commie!) rather than ketchup on his burger! Is there any evidence that the right wing wants to tell you what you can and can’t do on the most intimate level than this? Submit! Only we know what is the proper condiment to have on your food. If you thought freedom was having the government tell you how to worship the creator, who you could love and marry, what words you could say, and look at the books you took out of the library, how you used your credit card, what conversations you're having on the phone, and what you should write in e-mails wasn’t enough, now the rich, fat, white guys who have made a living telling you that rich, fat, white guys aren’t the problem have decided what the proper garnish is for your hamburger.

Really? Tell me Rush, am I holding my dick the right way when I take a piss? I’m sure you hold yours with tweezers but somehow I can't seem to manage that. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think I should be interested in WHAT FUCKING CONDIMENT PEOPLE USE ON THEIR FOOD!

All this talk about personal freedom and tyranny and all these shitheads want to do is tell everybody else how to live. It's the same thing with gay marrage. There is a simple reason I don't care if gay people want to get married. I’M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. In fact, the only way I can imagine being interested in gay men, in any way other than to thank them for taking themselves out of the competition for women I might want, is to be friends with them because they are decent human beings. I’ve got news for you Rush and all you right wingers who think you ought to be telling everybody else how they can live their lives- self-confident people DON’T CARE! I asked a gay friend several years ago why so many men were so threatened by homosexuality. His answer, without a microsecond of hesitation, was that they were fighting their own impulses to take it in the keister. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand that anymore than I could understand hating gay people for their sexual preferences. It actually doesn’t come up in casual conversation with even intimate friends. “So, Bob, you’ve been married for 15 years. Do you do it doggy style or what?” just hasn’t been a conversation I’ve ever been a party to. In fact, I’ve only discussed my sexual preferences with a sexual partner, and then only in bed (or on the couch, or the floor, or the woods, or in the car, or…well- you get the idea). If you really think sex is something sublime and sacred and intimate then you don’t discuss it in casual conversation. And if you think it isn't anything but a pleasurable pastime you don’t need to be talking about God in the same sentence unless you are screaming his name in the midst of the act. OK, Rush (and Hannity and all the other anacephalics at FOX who are going through withdrawal because they have quit being taken seriously because of all the inane shit like this that they've said over the last decade) I understand that you are still plumbing the depths of the stupidest redneck element of the American population. The kind of people who will turn out to protest a tax hike on people making over a quarter of a million dollars a year even though they just got a tax break and would have to think for a few seconds before they could tell you how many zeros a quarter of a million has (and the answer, from the teabagger’s turnout, seems to be less that .005. I wanted so badly to take my videocamera and ask the local protest of mentally and mathematically challenged sheeple how many of them made over $250.000 annually and whether they realized that they had already gotten a tax cut from Obama, but unfortunately I had to work.)

But anyway, back to the important point- which mustard is the most patriotic? Personally, I like Dejon mustard. In fact, I like the brown mustard that has horseradish in it. So obviously I must be a socialist-fascist-terrorist. Nothing else would make sense. It can’t just be that I like a little spice on my burger. My burger has to be a symptom of deeper hatred of America. Yeah, that’s it. My taste buds must hate America. And I wasn’t even aware of it! Thank you for pointing out that my taste buds are traitors and that you are marginally smarter than they are. Not as smart as my dog, but a little, little bit smarter than the papilla on my tongue.

Imagine how many votes you could get if you were as smart as the neurons in my big toe!

I don't want to be accused of advocating violence but truthfully, if you have been taken in by the right wing rhetoric for the last few years, do the species a favor and take one of those guns you love so much an put it in your mouth. After you pull the trigger you will have done the best thing for mankind that you have probably ever done. You will have raised the average IQ by a small, but measurable percentage. I know you love to think, talk, and post about how liberals are stupid but it's not them that's buying the bullshit. The saving grace of being a moron is that you get to think you are as smart as everyone else because you aren't smart enough to tell the difference. And while the kind of mustard you like isn't indicative of anything but the kind of mustard you like, thinking it might be, even for a minute, is sure an indicator of teh stupid. God, it even sounds like a National Enquirer article- "The Kind of Mustard You Like Reveals Your Personality!".

Think about the gun in the mouth thing. If you think liking Dejon mustard is a political statement then the taste of hard, blue gunmetal is the only solution.

POLITICS- George W. Bush is the Most Successful President EVAR

Eight years of Bush are almost over.

I’d say that this was a wonderful thing if I hadn’t lived through enough elections to realize that the American political system is basically the Pepsi challenge. Choose between two nearly identical varieties of un-natural empty calories, neither of which is good for you and either of which will take your teeth if they get the chance.

It’s tempting to pull out a laundry list of everything that’s gone wrong in the last eight years and lay it at the door of the Bush White House. But if you’ve been paying any attention to what’s been going on then you’ve already heard it, and if you haven’t then you obviously don’t care. Needless to say, plenty of other people have compiled such lists and a brief Google search will get you several thousand to choose from.

But what really interests me about the last eight years is that I still don’t know if our 43rd president and his cadre are megalomaniacal morons, too stupid to live and too rich, entitled, and intertwined into the plate of worms that is Washington to ignore, or if they are avaricious geniuses who figured out a way to dispense with mere graft and sweetheart deals and decided the best place to steal all the money was from the top down. A sort of trickle-down larceny.

Sure, even cursory examination immediately indicated that George W. Bush was a mediocre frat boy douchbag that had never worked a day or had a serious thought in his life. He projected that image like IMAX. It was on display during his first campaign and has never relented. The verbal gaffs, the nonsensical ideas, the shit-eating grin accompanied by the head bob and swivel (Kermit the frog did it better) every time he came to the end of a paragraph in one of his speeches- if they were part of an act then it was the best and most consistent feat of thespis in my lifetime. And my belief has always been that no one was capable of acting that stupid that long without slipping. But there are things that make me wonder.

The main thing is that Bush, and the neocons that created him, had a well defined plan in mind long before he got elected. Bill Kristol even published it before the election. They wanted to usher in a Pax-Americana. They intended to cement American hegemony by accomplishing several things that would make it clear that America was in charge and every other country in the world might as well just get in line. They would use America’s military might to fight not one but two wars simultaneously, proving to the world that even if we were busy kicking the shit out of somebody we didn’t like that there was still plenty of whoop-ass to go around, so don’t get any ideas. They were going to deregulate business, returning the country to a golden age of robber barons and, perhaps if they were lucky, feudalism. They were going to return God to government, not for the sake of making the country more like Jesus might want it to be but to unite those two age-old organizations for bending people to the will of their leaders- church and state. They were going to re-institute the divine right of kings by giving the president total power and making it not only improper but immoral to disagree with what he did. And they were going to do it all by finally proving once and for all that what arch cynic H. L. Mencken said was totally right- nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

And they simply can’t be as stupid as they look, because they did all of it!

And their final act was to finally acknowledge what people had been warning and they had been denying for years- that the result of all this was going to cause our whole economic system to collapse- just in time to panic and convince congress that letting them steal a few trillion more dollars as they were packing to leave would be good for the economy even if everything they had done up until then wasn't.

I am almost convinced that the presidency of George W. Bush is the most successful in history. I haven’t always thought that. I was convinced that they were just the kind of businessmen I had met numerous times when I was in business- idiotic con men who thought they were smarter than everyone else because they could double-talk, cheat, and swindle enough people to get rich. Those businessmen invariably wind up going from business failure to business failure, bankruptcy to bankruptcy, because even though they may be master salesmen they don’t know how to run anything. They may be able to talk some rube into buying a $40,000 SUV on a $27,000 a year salary, but the actual nuts and bolts of managing a business is beyond them. Invariably they wind up taking the money and running when it becomes obvious that it isn’t going to be possible to keep the game going any longer.

Well, maybe my first impression was right after all.

POLITICS- McCain's 100 Year Occupation

I haven’t been writing about politics lately because (like most of the country) I’ve gotten so tired of the permanent presidential campaign show that it’s all I can do to keep up with who lost the last staff member due to revelations about their past. But now that Barrack has finally dropped a house on Hillary once and for all, things are already starting to return to normal. And by normal I mean Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

On the war front, the initial volleys have picked off a few individual soldiers (a financial adviser here, a vice-presidential committee member there) doing no real damage to either force. Initial peace offerings have been made but it’s still to early in the conflict for them to be taken seriously. The nuclear option has already been discussed by the Republicans, but they always do that (well, the fucking penis envy Neocons, at least). Forward divisions have launched mostly ineffective ordinance in the hopes something will do some damage out of pure luck. Positions are being fortified and countermeasures are being undertaken. It’s going to be a long war.

But enough with tortured metaphors. There are a couple of interesting platform planks that the candidates have discussed in the last week or so.

Going from the metaphorical war of the campaign to the actual war where brave American men and women are dying, still. First is the idea of John McCain’s 100 years in Iraq. The quote has been played almost as much as the Reverend White tape. McCain says that it’s taken out of context and honest Dems have mostly agreed. But what McCain actually seems to mean, in that and subsequent statements this week (which he is also claiming were taken out of context), is that while he doesn’t want a 100 year WAR in Iraq, he is perfectly happy to establish a 100 year occupation. You know, like the relationship we have with so much of Europe and Japan- we’ll house troops in your country indefinitely. This idea is further supported by the fact that the President is trying to get the Iraqi leaders to sign off on a treaty that places over FIFTY US MILITARY BASES in the country. Now I could go into how this is exactly the kind of thing that prompted 9/11 in the first place (American troops in Saudi Arabia) but I don’t think that’s exactly true (I think the “they hate us for our freedom to have women get boob jobs and dress like tramps on the street” meme has some tread). Or I could go into how we really need to be getting our troops out of Europe and Japan instead of looking for new countries to spend billions of military dollars on every year. Or I could discuss the limited strategic value of having a staging area in the Middle East (in addition to the ones we have in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Israel). Or I could mention that this Middle East Domino Theory the Bush administration seems to be pursuing is a more ridiculous idea than the Maginot Line (still fighting the last war, but ignoring any lessons from that to try to fight the last war we won).

And I’m somewhat torn that we don’t owe the Iraqis as much long term stability as we can afford. Since we went and broke their country and all.

But the real reason is that what we promised the Iraqis was democracy, and I don’t think they are going to have it until we leave. As long as there are thousands of troops on the ground, we are going to be outsiders supporting a particular regime. And that kind of meddling in the Middle East was the real spark plug for 9/11. I understand that to the administration this looks like Saddam II: Democracy Boogaloo, the new and improved way to establish a US friendly regime while avoiding the old “our pocket dictator went rogue on us and now we’ve got to take him out” eventuality. The whole time wrapping it up in a “but they are a democratic country” teflon package. But it isn’t going to work. I’ve said from day one that the biggest mistake of this war wasn’t that Iraq was a threat or that democracy was good, it was the idea that an Arab country was going to be Pro-American and Pro-Israel just because we toppled a dictator that we had been supporting for years. The whole thing misses the point that democracy in other countries has been a two edged sword for American foreign policy over the last 60 years (we prefer friendly autocrats).We just need to get out of the nation building mindset. We need to bring our troops home and let the Iraqis decide what they are going to do with their country. If we really want to give them freedom.

But was that ever really the motivation?

TECHNOLOGY- EA is Watching You

Well, it looks like Electronic Arts has just taken the first step in what might be the biggest incitement to pirate computer games since the invention of the floppy disk. PC versions of Mass Effect and Spore are going to require a computer connection. Not so you can play online, they are single player games. No, they’re going to need a net enabled computer so they can CALL HOME EVERY TEN DAYS to re-authenticate their DRM! If this catches on I can see a future where every piece of software, movie, CD, toaster, hell, anything, will have to be online to work. Vista’s Big Brotheresque tendencies may spread like electronic kudzu to everything you own. I don’t know about you, but I’m not crazy about companies knowing more about my gaming and viewing proclivities than I do.

Oh, I know. Advocates of totalitarianism in the guise of piracy protection will say that EA isn’t going to keep tabs on individual gamers. And that’s probably true, if you believe that businesses would never do any thing unethical just because they can.

Hell, my DVR already keeps tabs on my viewing, my government monitors my phone calls and emails, my cell phone company knows who I call, and for all I know somebody is actually reading this blog. I thought is was illegal to install a hack on someone’s computer so you could monitor them. I can’t open my television to fix something without the possibility of violating some reverse engineering law but EA can hack my computer because I want to play a game they make? Guess that law is only for citizens.

POLITICS- MYOB

Had to drop a line here on Superbowl Sunday though I feel like I’ve been trying to die for the last couple of weeks. Super Sunday kicks off a super week as Super Tuesday is only two days away. It’s been the best football season I can remember. And here we have the Giants playing the Patriots. The Patriots are trying to cap a perfect season and their fourth SB victory since 9-11. The Giants are returning for the first time since they won during the first Iraq War in 1990.

And Arlen Specter is thinking of sticking his nose into the signal stealing incident that started the season. Seems Mr. Spector doesn’t have the Gulianies to take the administration to task for the disappearance of the videotapes showing our government torturing people, so he’s decided to look into the disappearance of the tapes the Patriots made trying to steal other teams signals. He says NFL Commissioner Goodell’s statement about why he destroyed the tapes “doesn’t ring true” and he wants to meet with him. I don’t know if this is an example of the incredible ego of the ruling class or just another way the Republicans are trying to draw attention to anything other than their incredible incompetence and carpetbagging for the last eight years. Instead of protecting the constitution and country from a president or his own party that has thumbed his nose at checks and balances, Spector has decided to micromanage the NFL. And regarding missing videotapes! Wingnuts percieve irony like a dog staring at a Jackson Pollack painting.

No laws were violated, no one was injured, a friggin’ sports rule was broken. President Bush thinks he’s a king. Arlen Spector thinks he’s running football. The Republicans wonder why they won’t be winning this election. And the pundits wonder why everyone in the country thinks the government has become a malignancy.

POLITICS- Keep Off the Grass

Following the mantra that more government is good government, Murfreesburo, Tennessee has passed a couple of new laws that are sorely needed to protect our lives and homes. It is now illegal to put living room furniture on your porch or park your car on your yard. For sheer inanity this rivals a new zoning ordinance passed year before last in Franklin, TN that told homeowners which way their garages should face. One can only imagine what serious problems of public policy these stalwart defenders of freedom will undertake next. Perhaps one of these elected aristocrats will decide what color shirts we should all wear on Wednesdays. There are simply no words to express how silly this seems to me. Is it really what we elect people to do? According to the online poll at the time I last looked, people who think so are outnumbered by the sane in a 3 to 2 ratio.