John Dean Is One DEPRESSING Bastard

Insert the vengeful, apocalyptic wrath of the space-God Jehovah-1 here.

Good grief, y'all. This is going to be one depressing holiday season. "And the seven dwarves? Well, there's only four alive today. Cinderella— she's working for the CIA." -'Cinderella Undercover', Oingo Boingo

If the Cardinals lose tonight, then...

...it will be undeniable that God is punishing America for its sin.

Isn't The CIA Supposed To Be Accountable To Congress?

The Congress requested the inspector general of the CIA to investigate intelligence failures prior to September 11, 2001 and also into what has been done since then to remedy the system that produced those failures. Apparently, the Bush Administration is telling the CIA to withhold the IG's report until after the election, because it names names and calls out senior administration officials for responsibility.

Have there really not been any previous incidents when the Congress has asked the CIA to produce a report, the CIA has written the report, then refused to deliver it without having a "national security" explanation for its refusal?

Bush-Cheney 2004 Campaign Comes Out Against Protecting Civil Liberties

Via some threadjacker in an Atrios thread, we find an article in the Bend Bugle.

October 14 - MEDFORD – President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony – or tragedy – Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said “Protect Our Civil Liberties,” the Democratic Party of Oregon reported.

Of course, the Democratic Party of Oregon might be lying about this incident, because— as we all know too well— the Democrats are a pack of filthy prevaricators. The truth is not in them, you know. So, of course, their press releases can be discounted without even reading them. Without even any supporting evidence, in fact.

(Relax, folks— I'm just practicing for life after Bush-Cheney wins the election, and all of us proud members of the "reality-based community" are either interned in concentration camps for questioning the authority of the ministry of state security, or we find a way to pass ourselves off as Patriotically Correct while we're secretly supporting La Resistance.)

Predictable... So UTTERLY Predictable...

Right there in front of God and the Committee on Presidential Debates, George W Bush told his biggest whopper yet. With a straight face, he asserted he had never said he wasn't worried about Osama Bin Whatzhisname. "That's what you call an exaggeration," he wheedled.

By all rights, this should give the media all the excuse it needs to replay the clip from the President's press conference earlier this year when he said exactly the words John Kerry quoted him as saying. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over AGAIN!

From March 2003, when somebody asked him about Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda while troops were massed on the Kuwaiti frontier with Iraq poised for invasion:

Well, deep in my heart, I know the man is on the run if he's alive at all.... [H]e's a person who's now been marginalized. His network is -- his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match.... So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. [...] I truly am not that concerned about him.

Is that the story today? No. The story is Lynne Cheney complaining about John Kerry answering a question about the issue of homosexuality by referencing Mary Cheney, the Vice President's openly gay daughter.

Fscking whorehoppers. Utterly predictable: fscking whorehoppers. Never forget this fact about the media.

Operation Truth

I just sent some money to the good and brave folks at Operation Truth. You should send money too. And if you have lawyers, they might be good too— because I suspect they're going to need them. They are going to piss off some seriously powerful GOP moneybags with their message.

And you definitely must hear the radio advertisement they did. Quite possibly the best thing ever recorded in any media by Jesse "The Mind" Ventura.

W Disappears into Black Hole of Shrillness

From a dispatch I shot over to Shrillblog a little while ago...

Oh my God...

Did you see the debate? I believe the President's own treacherous and pathological inability to tell the truth has finally turned inwards and driven him permanently and irretrievably shrill... Like the dog catching its own tail, the President descended into an enternal and damned moebius feedback loop of hysterical lies and shrillness right before our eyes this evening... He positively attained a shrill-singularity, surrounded by an event horizon of mendacity; a point of no return from which not even truth, itself, can escape.

The President gazed into the other side of the void and summarily spun completely out of control in front of the entire nation on prime time TV.

I swear there were times I thought I could see the thought bubble above JK's head saying "do I really have to be here for this, he's doing pretty good all on his own..."

mojo sends

It was a site to see... and the call from the polls, across the board: it's a hat-trick for JK. Now let's just see if he can translate this into a stronger message and consistent campaign for the next couple of weeks... oh please, oh please, oh please...

Evidence of Things Not Seen...

So the latest burning through the blogosphere...with great thanks to Comrade Joshua about the latest outrage belching forth from the Mighty Wurlitzer and its hideous ringmasters Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove.

Instead of trying to steal the election at the 11th hour, they have apparently decided to get a jump on the theft this year with a fairly efficient machine. But apparently, it was too much for some of the pissant footsoldiers to deal with.

Fascinating. Employees of Voters Outreach of America, a GOP-funded voter registration outfit operating in Nevada, say they personally witnessed company employees shredding hundreds or even thousands of Democratic registrations. Now the same company (VOA) is being accused of destroying Democratic registration forms in Oregon.

The head of VOA is Nathan Sproul, a Republican political consultant who used to be the executive director of the Arizona state Republican party. Before that, he was the executive director of the Arizona Christian Coalition.

In gaining access to venues to register voters, he has apparently been claiming that his group is part of America Votes, a voter education and registration groups put together by a consortium of Democrat-leaning groups like the AFL-CIO, Emily's List, the Sierra Club and others.

A quick scan of Nexis shows Sproul's outfit is also operating in West Virginia (see Charleston Gazette, August 20th), where they've already raised some controversy for misleading tactics if not yet for destroying legally valid registrations.

Bottom line, the GOP has no intention of allowing a free and fair election this year. If George Bush wins, there is almost no chance of legitimacy of the vote. This is how things will be from now on.

Then even as the Sinclair family of Republi-vision television stations prepare to squid all over their audiences, Sinclair's CEO was doing a little squiddin' of his own last night. This from the dread pages of the dread Atrios Codex:

Haha. Check out what Sinclair CEO David Smith made his news anchors read after he got arrested.

Hilarious. Here's how news reports described it at the time:

The president of Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns the local Fox television affiliate, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with committing a perverted sex act in a company-owned Mercedes, city police said.

David Deniston Smith, 45, of the 800 block of Hillstead Drive in Timonium, who also is Sinclair's chief executive, was arrested in an undercover sting at Read and St. Paul streets, a downtown corner frequented by prostitutes, Baltimore police said yesterday.

Smith and Mary DiPaulo, 31, were charged with committing unnatural and perverted sex act. Smith was held overnight at the Central Booking and Intake Center and released on personal recognizance at 2 p.m. yesterday. DiPaulo's bail status was not available.
Officials at the time:

The president of Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns the local Fox television affiliate, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with committing a perverted sex act in a company-owned Mercedes, city police said.

David Deniston Smith, 45, of the 800 block of Hillstead Drive in Timonium, who also is Sinclair's chief executive, was arrested in an undercover sting at Read and St. Paul streets, a downtown corner frequented by prostitutes, Baltimore police said yesterday.

Smith and Mary DiPaulo, 31, were charged with committing unnatural and perverted sex act. Smith was held overnight at the Central Booking and Intake Center and released on personal recognizance at 2 p.m. yesterday. DiPaulo's bail status was not available.

Officials at WBFF-TV (Fox 45) and Sinclair, one of the fastest-growing broadcasting companies in the nation with 28 television and 34 radio stations, would not comment yesterday. The company had $126 million in sales in the first half of this year.

Police said undercover Officer Gary Bowman, on a prostitution detail, was talking to DiPaulo about 9: 15 p.m. in a car at St. Paul and Read streets. She left the undercover car after telling Bowman that ``she had just seen her regular date driving in the area,'' according to court documents.

Police said DiPaulo ran across the street to a 1992 Mercedes, registered to Sinclair, and got in on the passenger side. Police followed the car onto the Jones Falls Expressway, where they said they witnessed the two engage in oral sex while Smith drove north.

Police said they followed the car back to Read and St. Paul streets, where they arrested Smith and DiPaulo, who lives in the 700 block of Washington Blvd.

You can't make stuff like this up! These are the kind of scumbags we're dealing with. A guy with that much money has to cruise to Mt. Washington, pick up some skank and pay her for a rolling knob shine on the JFX, only to get nailed by Baltimore's finest.

How pathetic is that? Seriously, how weak? BTW... Read Street is more notorious for it's gay prostitutes and cross dressers... one would be more likely to find one of those than a straight female prostitute at the corner of St. Paul and Read... odd he should go there. Is there a little more Mr. Smith would like to tell his audience about his indiscretion?

James Surowiecki writes in The New Yorker about "one of the great rip-offs in American history"— the FCC licenses for local broadcast analog television.

Anybody who is outraged about the issue of Sinclair Broadcasting airing a one-hour propaganda video a week before the Presidential Election probably ought to consider directing some of their ire to the bigger picture.

[...]
In fact, the fight over spectrum has little to do with what people watch and a lot to do with what economists call “rent-seeking.” “Rents,” in econo-speak, are the excess profits that monopolists reap in the absence of competition. By endowing local broadcasters with free channels, the government effectively made them little spectrum monopolists, and the one thing we know about monopolies is that they do not disappear of their own volition. The broadcasters, thanks in large part to their monopolies, have enormous lobbying resources, and their control of the airwaves has made local television—and, in particular, local television news—a powerful weapon to wield against politicians who cross them. Politics drives the business, and the business shapes the politics. As for the public interest—does “Desperate Housewives” count?

The good news: we all get the government the majority deserve. The information: the majority deserve the government we're about to get.

"What Are They Going To Do? Send Us To Iraq?"

Yet another excellent find from MaxSpeak, You Listen!

[...]
Combs and another Marine boarded a small bus packed mostly with women and children. He walked up the center aisle carrying his M-16 assault rifle, then got off, disgusted.

"We just scared the living [expletive] out of a bunch of people," he said. "That's all we did."

When the Marines returned to their truck, Autin and Kelly began to debate the merits of the American presence in Iraq.

"And, by the way, why are we here?" Autin said.

"I'll tell you why we're here," Kelly replied. "We're here to help these people."

Autin agreed and said he supported the mission.

He added later that it was difficult to wage the battle when American commanders were holding them back.

"We feel they care more about Iraqi civilians than they do American soldiers," he said.

Asked if he was concerned that the Marines would be punished for speaking out, Autin responded: "We don't give a crap. What are they going to do, send us to Iraq?"

We're here to help these people by scaring the living expletive out of them. That's pretty much the best summation of American foreign policy I've seen in years. One day soon, the fatigue will set in, and America's haunted house ride will no longer scare the children like it used to do.

These fine young men are not going to like their country very much when they see what it turns into after that happens.

There Are Just Too Many Precious Moments To Count Them All

My current favorite underplayed Presidential grammar flub from the 2nd Presidential Candidate Debate of 2004, from W's answer to the question about how he plans to fight the Global War On Terroiristes without resorting to military conscription, where he talks about why the all-volunteer Army is important to something he thinks is called "military transformation":

It also means that we can target things easier and move more quickly, which means we need to be lighter and quicker and more facile and highly trained.

He thinks we need to be "more facile" does he? I remember when I saw him use that word live on television. I remarked at the time to my friends, "I don't think he knows what that word really means."

Here's the definition from Dictionary.Com (emphasis added -ed):

fac·ile     P   Pronunciation Key  (fsl)
adj.
Done or achieved with little effort or difficulty; easy. See Synonyms at easy.

Working, acting, or speaking with effortless ease and fluency.

Arrived at without due care, effort, or examination; superficial: proposed a facile solution to a complex problem.

Readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth: a facile slogan devised by politicians.

Archaic. Pleasingly mild, as in disposition or manner.

And he thinks the military needs to be "more facile"— I love that. That just cracks me up every time I hear it.

Outsourcing Torture

Just go read this article (and its predecessors if you have the time and inclination) at Obsidian Wings and do what must be done.

Insert the vengeful, apocalyptic wrath of the space-God Jehovah-1 here.