The “every form of witchcraft is what we rebuke” part is the only thing that he seems to have prayed over her. Is he telling us something about the VP candidate we need to know?

Seriously, wtf?

Does anybody actually wonder why Americans are so unwelcome in other parts of the world?

If I were from somewhere else and saw stuff like this regularly I’m pretty sure that I’d firmly believe that Americans, on the whole, are morons:

This just pisses me off ’cause it’s beyond fucking wrong, and it’s intentional:

As if life wasn’t hard enough, some lowlife, scumbag griefers have taken to deliberate assaults on people who suffer from both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epilepsy.

Wired magazine reported last month: “Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.”

How not to assault your users.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

—Theodore Roosevelt

California’s Senators Boxer and Feinstein are both on the right side of Net Neutrality. Here’s where you can check to see if you need to write a letter to your Senator to encourage them to support Net Neutrality.

Remember… “it’s easier to catch bees with honey than it is with vinegar,” so if you write, be sure to state your opinion factually and respectfully.

Keith Olbermann takes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to task on the recent “fascism” comments Rumsfeld has been making, and he’s about as spot-on as one can get. I full agree that this issue “demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American.”

Elected officials at the top of the government of the United States are confusing themselves with God.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story, with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American. For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land; worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq. It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile… it is right - and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril - with a growing evil - powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s - questioning their intellect and their morality.
(a href=”http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/08/30/keith-olbermann-delivers-one-hell-of-a-commentary-on-rumsfeld/” target=”_blank”>more)

The complete video and transcript are available at Crooks and Liars.

Via Media Matters:

And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn’t teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn’t teach them how to butcher a — slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in — is in government.

Funny, I thought you got milk from a cow and then churned said milk to make butter, and that dead cows give no milk. Rush Limbaugh’s head is so far up his anus that he thinks you have to kill a cow to get butter.

Greg Palast lets it rip in a blog post titled: “So, Osama walks into this bar, see?”

But Americans don’t ask for real protection from what’s killing us. The War on Terror is the Weapon of Mass Distraction. Instead of demanding health insurance, we have 59 million of our fellow citizens pooping in their pants with fear of Al Qaeda, waddling to the polls, crying, “Georgie save us!”

And what does he give us? In my own small town, the federal government has paid for loading an SUV with .50 caliber machine guns to watch for an Al Qaeda attack at the dock of the ferry that takes tourists to the Indian casino in Connecticut. The casino dock is my town’s officially designated “Critical Asset and Vulnerability Infrastructure Point (CAVIP).” (To find the most vulnerable points to attack in the USA, Al Qaeda can download a list from the Department of Homeland Security — no kidding.)

But that’s not all. Bush is protecting us from English hijackers with a fearsome anti-terrorist tool: the Virginia-class submarine. The V-boat was originally meant to hunt Soviet subs. But there are no more Soviet subs. So, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin have “refitted” these Cold War dinosaurs with new torpedoes redesigned to carry counter-terror commandoes. That’s right: when we find Osama’s beach house, we can shoot our boys right up under his picnic table and take him out. These Marines-in-a-tube injector boats cost $2.5 billion each — and our President’s ordered half a dozen new ones.

Lynn Cheney, the Veep’s wife, still takes in compensation from Lockheed as a former board member. I’m sure that has nothing to do with this multi-billion dollar “anti-terror” contract.

Fear sells better than sex. Fear is the sales pitch for many lucrative products: from billion-dollar sailor injectors to one very lucrative war in Mesopotamia (a third of a trillion dollars doled out, no audits, no questions asked).
(emphasis added)

(Thanks Stragglyr Chris)

This post at Crooks and Liars has the video clip and complete transcript of Joe Scarborough asking “Is Bush an Idiot?” They show numerous clips of Bush and have a brief discussion. It’s pretty unbelievable that an uber-liberal news commentary show like Scarborough Country would ask such a thing.

If you’re not scared shitless and hiding in fear because of the recently foiled terrorist threat then CNN is here to help you.

This is a brilliantly concise articulation of the current state of events. Bravo, Mike Luckovich from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Bravo!

Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker (the reporter who broke the Abu Gharib story) has some pretty damning things to say about the U.S. encouraging Israel to pursue Hezbollah as a sort of test run for military action in Iran. His comments indicate that the Israeli/Hezbolah fighting going on now was pre-planned. Please, watch the video.

(h/t Chris Knight)

I wish I could articulate my thoughts as coherently and as articulately as those in this post from Down With Tyranny!:

There comes a time when we have to listen to the voices trying to reach through the media buzz of Fox news and the right wing talk radio of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy. We need to turn down the volume on the Laura Ingrahams and the Ann Coulters of the fringe right. There comes a time when sober citizens must hear the voices of their military leaders who are speaking, by necessity, in hushed tones, and those who can speak out strongly as Jack Murtha has done in the House and on the MSM.

Jack Murtha has not been shy about telling Americans that he is speaking for the military because the military cannot legally speak up for themselves. In the book Fiasco, author Tom Ricks helps military leaders tell the truth to the American people. (Richard Clarke tells the truth to the American People, Ron Suskind tells the truth to the American people… you get the picture, time to listen.)

On Wednesday, in a news conference, Tony Snow tells us that a vote for Lamont is a vote for another 9/11. On Fox news there is a Col. Hunt who says we line up Iranians and Syrians and kill them. These statements are inflammatory. They are not responsible statements. There is no statesmanship in those statements. There is certainly no wisdom in them. Statements like these are designed to play to the reactionaries among us.

At this juncture, Mr. Bush enjoys, at best, little over 30% in approval ratings, and nothing gives him a lasting bounce. His Secretary of State is under attack from the right wing for being too concerned about peace, too hesitant to let the battle in the Middle East rage. His Secretary of Defense cannot muster a coherent statement on his continued failures. His Attorney General is speechless as he tries so hard to get the Senate to give him their permission to let this Regime torture. It seems personal.

It’s probably “bad form” to quote so much of that, but it’s a worthy read.

According to news sources, President George W. Bush has now read a book of greater magnitude and scope than “My Pet Goat.” Impressively, he actually quoted Camus, in a speech that he, y’know… must have written himself, since he read the book six months after quoting the author.

“We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that ‘freedom is a long-distance race.’ We’re in that race for the duration”

I’m impressed with the President’s ability to choose the most apt, non-sports-cliche metaphor in the exhaustive literary tome, which weighs in at a whopping 144 pages and is assigned to Freshman English students all around the country (’cept me). However, the book might have been a bad choice. Amazon’s synopsis:

The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus’s compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt–all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it’s not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he’s imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial’s proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities–that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother’s death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts–so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

When is James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson going to condem Bush for reading such an amoral/immoral story? Whatever happened to the good old American values practiced by believing that “if it ain’t Bible it ain’t true?” Bush risks losing the support of the Religious Right if he continues to read elitist French authors like “Kaymus.” (Amoral is bad enough… but it was written by one of those anti-American cowardly French bastards? HERESY!)

Reading is fundamental.
Not reading is Fundamentalist.

I can’t believe that Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would actually hold a press conference to demonstrate how to make a Liquid Bomb using ingredients readily available at any convenience store. What the hell were they thinking? They’ve just conducted a training exercise for any and every terrorist who has the ability to turn on a television set (and well, a really good antenna).

Washington, DC (Rotters) - The Department of Homeland security today released further information in regards to the terrorist liquid bomb plot in London. The press conference was capped off by a demonstration of the effectiveness of one of the terrorists’ proposed devices. Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales constructed and detonated a small yield device to the stunned silence of the press in attendance. No one was harmed in the demonstration, but a number of angry photographers were seen wiping residue from lenses.

“Just think what could be achieved on a larger scale”, stated Chertoff. “No one would have been spared if we have chosen instead to use perhaps a liter bottle of fluid. The same principles can be applied towards a deadly rocket. The administration has been communicating closely with the Israelis and we really believe that as the conflict in Lebanon winds down and the materials and supplies for war dry up they may be faced with just such improvised rockets from Hezbollah.”
…

“The war on terror is an ongoing thing,” added Attorney General Gonzalez, “we adapt and we improvise and we adjust our tactics. Americans have always been willing to make sacrifices during times of war. Reluctantly, we will institute tomorrow a ban on all carbonated beverages in America as well as suspect over-the-counter breath freshener preparations. Bad breath is a small sacrifice we can all pay in support of our troops overseas.”

From the Book of Danstrodamus, Danalonians 5:8:

Listen ye to Danstrodamus* as I have seen a vision of the future… The news in the next few weeks will be full of stories of impending doom and disaster, warmongering, glorification of ignorance, and political posturing (primarily, sayeth Danstrodamus parenthetically, from Neocons).

From ABC News:

Aug. 11, 2006 - The Department of Homeland Security released a statement Wednesday advising Windows PC owners across the nation to update their computers or face a potential attack from hackers.

“The Department of Homeland Security is recommending that Windows Operating Systems users apply Microsoft security patch MS06-040 as quickly as possible,” the statement read. “This security patch is designed to protect against a vulnerability that, if exploited, could enable an attacker to remotely take control of an affected system.”

I don’t recall the Department of Homeland Security ever issuing a warning about critical security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s products. While this is a legitimate software security issue (actually 12 issues rolled into one), this isn’t the first critical security vulnerability in Microsoft’s products… by far.

Digression: these types of security vulnerabilities aren’t just in Microsoft’s products… they’re in almost any major appliction or operating system you might use (MacOS, Firefox, Linux, etc., etc., etc.). Security issues caused by buffer overflows are incredibly common. So common, in fact, that you’d think they’d be a primary focus of most software testing. The reality is that business requirements for features and the need to get a product out into the market usually outweigh the comittment to Quality. Aside from that, it’s impossible to test anything as complex as an operating system 100%… this is the reality of Software Development.
Light from my inner QA Engineering Self shines through…

Why is the Department of Homeland Security promoting patching security vulnerabilities in software now?

In an unusual move, the Department of Homeland Security has warned Windows users to protect themselves against the latest vulnerability in the Microsoft system. (ABC News)
(emphasis added)

It’s hard to shake the idea that this isn’t a political tactic to expand and inflate the wave of fear and terror from the recently “foiled” terrorist bomb plot. “Foiled” is in quotes as it really looks like the terrorists have accomplished their objective of generating fear and terror in the world, even though they didn’t manage to step foot in the airport with their physical weapons. Their psychological weapons are being enhanced, promoted, exaggerated and hyped by uber-liberal-media outlets like Fox News…

Terror Plot Suspects Planned ‘Dry-Run’ of Attacks in Next 2 Days, Sources Say

The development came as British authorities said they were “urgently” seeking the arrests of up to 10 more suspects in the terrorist plot uncovered early Thursday morning to blow up U.S.-bound flights with liquid explosives carried onto planes via carry-on luggage, FOX News learned.

An American law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation said it appeared the liquid to be used was a “peroxide-based solution” to be detonated by an electronic device that was not specified, but could be anything from a disposable camera to a portable digital music player. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because British authorities had asked that no information be released.

Bush Praises Effort to Thwart Terror Plot

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Thursday praised the coordinated government efforts to stop a terror plot to blow up airline flights from the United Kingdom to the United States, and said American flyers will be inconvenienced for a while in order for officials to keep them safe.

“The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” Bush said on a tarmac in Green Bay, Wis., before delivering a speech on the economy.

Massachusetts Governor to Activate National Guard for Logan Airport

BOSTON- Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will activate the National Guard to help with security at Logan International Airport for the first time since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The security alert was raised at Logan and airports around the nation early Thursday after officials in Great Britain disrupted a terror plot to blow up airplanes from London to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the alleged plot appeared to be engineered by Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that hijacked two planes from Logan on Sept. 11, 2001, and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York.

Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, confirmed the governor was activating the guard. Romney met first thing in the day with public safety and transportation officials to get a status report and consider any additional response to the thwarted plot.

*Important Note: Danstrodamus is not Captain Obvious, though they basically have almost identical things to say.

I had to fly back to San Jose yesterday, and I’ve been considering blogging about the foiled terrorist plot which has wreaked havoc on normalcy and well, sanity, and I still might. In the meantime, Ze Frank has a video blog that hits some nails quite squarely on the head, far less rantily and far more coherently that I would. It’s “must-see” citizen media.

“Now the way I see it, you can’t have terrorism without terror…”

Dear Connecticut Democrats: Thank you!