Sean Hannity, Suicide Bomber

August 29, 2006
"There are things in life worth fighting and dying for, and one of 'em is making sure" that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (CA) "doesn't become the speaker."

Go over to http://mediamatters.org/items/200608310002 for the full rant.

This is the same day Rumsfeld accused "some" of being morally and intellectually confused.

This is how the neoconservatives commemorate the anniversary of the worst natural domestic disaster of our time.

I ask you, Mr. Hannity and Mr. Rumsfeld: What made it worthwhile for the victims of Katrina to die?

Wanted: Dead or Alive

Bush made promises he's plumb forgotten
The original problem's still bin Laden
But we really wanna
Remember Osama
Still un-run, un-smoked, and un-gotten

*****************
A quick contest update; I am getting together a small bag of goodies to award the winner. Nothing fancy, so there's no need to worry about the IRS dunning you for taxes.

I'm giving everybody plenty of time to get their entries in; I imagine sometime mid-September for a deadline. And I will be publishing the stand-outs in a regular post.

So like they used to say on Laugh-in, "Sock it to me, baby!"

The Saints are Marchin' In, but the Devil's still in Charge

Or I should properly say devils. It's been a long melancholy day down in the Big Easy, where not much is easy anymore. Under the best of conditions, recovery from a disaster the magnitude of Katrina would be an uphill struggle. Unfortunately, as we saw during the initial crisis and its immediate aftermath, this gang in DC and their cronies, inside the government and out, seem determined to make the polar opposite of good decisions. Especially when they are lots a' cash dolla' bills to go around. Make no mistake. There is truly no human suffering these swine can't figure out how to turn a profit off of.

Just makes me all warm inside every time I hear Chucklenuts (as Mike Malloy calls the Prez) yakkin' about the "evildoers". I think the shrinks call that projection.

In another notable case of pot calling kettle black, today Dumbsfeld celebrated the anniversary of the biggest debacle of this administration by having the nerve to accuse people opposing the war on Iraq of being morally and intellectually confused. To paraphrase Al Franklin, I'm pretty sure this hate speech says more about Rummy than it does about us.

So enough for those bastards; we'll sort them out soon enough. In the spirit of the day, and since I am sponsoring a contest (see previous post), I thought I would offer the good folk of the Crescent City a little love:

N'Awlins, you will survive, come what may
Spirit strong, even tho' blue today
Let FEMA be rotten
You are not forgotten
You will laissez les bons temps rouler!

The Nipsey Russell Memorial Front Porch Limerick Contest!

With the Dog Days of Summer upon us, it's kind of hard not to get a touch of the blues. So I want all you thinkers, winkers, and general ne'r-do-wells to tap into your sense of humor. Feel free to use as much profanity, innuendo, and low comedy as suits your needs. We are talking LIMERICKS here!

Winner will be determined by the obvious -- make us all laugh out loud.

Below are examples -- I apologize for the lameness thereof.

There is a ranch out in Texas
Whose owner surely does vex us
Surly and plain old hating
Even when he's out vacating
That he ain't on trial yet just wrecks us

Many churches have a big steeple
A voting booth should show how we pull
With elections coming yet
None of us should forget
That George Bush don't like black people

As I'm running the contest, my limericks are of course inelligible...but I'm planning on coming up with a few more, just for shits and grins. Have fun!

An American Hero or Two

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

-- Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, 1974

**********

The President of the United States, a creature of the same Constitution which gave us these Amendments, has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all "inherent power" must derive from that Constitution.

-- U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, 2006

Amen, sisters.

Party, schmarty

Did you hear the RNC gave Lieberman all but an open endorsment? Over their own candidate in Connecticut?

And us lefty bloggers are supposed to feel bad about pointing out he sold his SOUL to the Kool Aid?

Meanwhile MSM is still kowtowing to the official line...and refusing to report the TRUTH. Authorities in London are quite put out that the political needs of Monkey and Poodle outweigh the patience needed to truly thwart terrorism.

Welcome to Election Season.

I bet there is alarm at the White House...after the hot war has calmed down a bit around Israel. It's been distracting from the ONGOING CIVIL WAR in Iraq. I hear that Bush is frustrated that the "Iraqi people" haven't jumped on his democracy bandwagon.

Well, DUH!

America is not the police of the world....that's the job we all gave the UN after WWII. Peace in Iraq will not come by the US forces. If the world was wise setting up Israel, let the world negotiate Iraq. You just simply cannot bomb to democracy...

The recent war on Lebannon has reitterated a simple fact...armies don't kill insurgencies, and bombs reinforce. I don't want to "coddle" Hezballaa; but I certainly want to engage diplomacy. Our only President is a black and white fella. He needs to look another leader in the eye to judge his soul. Sad, that. He's spurned Iran's President, and his overture to personally negotiate.

Saw the man interviewed last Sunday on 60 Minutes. Even if through an entrepreter, he maintained a civil demeanor, and even poked fun at his own international reputation of being "crazy" while being grilled by Mike Wallace. His own talking points were very simple; Iran wants to be treated like any other country in reference to nuclear power, and as far as Israel? The people of Palestine did not perpetrate the Holocaust -- this was a European/Western conflict. Why should the people of Palestine be displaced and made to be refugees for decades when they had no part of WWII?

That's your crazyman in Iran.

Our planet is more dangerous now because our own country refuses to be a part of it. It is up to us, the US people, to force change.

Honestly, what country is being run by a strongman?

You say tomato

...and I say tomahto -- phonetics can be fun! Something that has interested me all my life is dialects; we have some truly amazing ones in our fair land. Not just the southern drawls of my own younger years, but the almost staccato speech of the northeast cities. New York City alone has a multitude of accents -- understandable given the diversity and backgrounds of it's citizens.

Then there are the broad tones of the Midwest, the slight lilt of the Upper Plains, the Spanish-tinged voices in the desert Southwest, and the clear conversation of the West Coast, familiar to most of us from the large entertainment industry in Southern California.

And each of these have their own sub-dialects, not to mention the rural areas. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is also wonderful that all across the land, the distinctive speech of African Americans can be heard. I remember the brouhaha over the concept of Ebonics, and it just made me put my head in my hands and sigh. It amazes me that latent racism allows someone to look down upon a black woman "holding forth", when this may be one of our strongest and most effective dialects between the shining seas. I find it striking, as a lesbian from the Deep South, that many anglo gays, especially men, have adopted and embraced quite a few of the expressions and mannerisms of the African American community. To put it another way, nobody reads someone's beads like a Sistah.

I recently heard of a trend in the South, of people seeking to modify their accents, going so far as to enroll in classes to "lose their Southern accent" and I must say I was mildly horrified. That almost seems to me to be an attempt to forget where one came from, which I find sad. Certainly I believe one should be educated, and able to write a correctly spelled and punctuated sentence, but that needn't be at the expense of parting with one's earliest education -- language. That's melting the pot a bit too far for my tastes. I've lived in several different parts of the country, and have picked up some of the local lingua from all of them -- but nothing tickles me more than having someone turn around and say, "You're from Arkansas, aren't you?"

It's all a part of communicating in America. But I fear, in our political dialog, we've allowed some unfortunate rhetoric and catch-phrases to creep in, and skew the semantics.

For example: Global warming -- the buzz-word that encompasses the wide concept of environmental change. It's been an uphill battle, and it's still being fought, to get the multinational monied interests, and the politicians they own, to even acknowledge the concept, but at last common sense is coming in vogue. Even W has had to grudgingly admit there's a problem.

Sorry,
George,
but yes,
we have no bananas.

I think we need to rachet this up a notch; "global warming" sounds somewhat passive. I suggest we start calling it global HEATING. Because that's what we are doing to the planet.

Then there is the military rhetoric, with so many examples of Newspeak Orwell's Ministry of Truth couldn't keep up. I particularly abhor "defense spending." Goes hand in hand with this idea of "preemptive" actions. Sum that thought up in "offensive spending", and you get quite a bit closer to the truth these days.

To bring it all together, doesn't matter if you say it with a cultured sniff, a drawl, a twang, or street-smart smack, the truth will always set you free.

Stay the course? Tomato, tomahto, potato, potahto, let's call the whole thing off.

Blessed are the peacemakers...

Seems there was something seriously amiss in San Diego this week...

Last weekend was the annual Pride Festival in Balboa Park. Reports are conflicting, but it seems that five gay men were assaulted (beaten and stabbed) by at least three individuals while leaving the festival.

I looked up some news reports on this. Is it my understanding the five attacked were ambushed and done one by one?

It's never failed to amaze me it seems to take at least three straight men, usually armed with either clubs and/or knives, to bash one queer. At best, one has to question the basic manliness of the 'tough guys'.

And rarely do they shoot us, unless it's a couple of lesbians out in the williwags hiking, stalked by an anonymous sniper. Years ago.

That's got to tell you how strong we are...

Until we get our country back, until we get the people to understand the danger of hate, no one, gay or straight, will be safe.

Until we get the people to understand that gay marriage in no way undermines straight marriage, no one is safe.

Until we realize we've put our troops in a dessert version of Vietnam, overseeing a predictable civil war, no one is safe.

Ask any woman on the ground in US uniform if she doesn't watch her back with extra care -- not from enemy fire, but being caught alone by her own soldiers.

How bad does it have to get in Iraq, between "collateral damage", our troops without a clear mission, and what's been obvious all along, that we are training the insurgents exactly how to whop big army, before we finally wake up?

W's Daddy was craven, and lead many Iraqis to rebel, and then be hammered by Saddam for doing so without support in Gulf War One. But at least he wasn't foolish enough to wade in. Bush II has plunged the entire neighborhood into conflict, because he didn't understand one simple fact Daddy did -- you cannot remove a strongman and leave a vaccuum.

September 11th was a Tuesday; the next weekend, over a million people in Tehran, Iran, rallied to show SUPPORT for the United States. Do you remember? Shia women, as usual with their faces covered, crying and lighting candles? It was a stark reminder that the world hates to see innocent people die.

And can you imagine how different our world would be had Albert Gore been allowed to take his elected post? If 9-11 couldn't have been thwarted, at the least we would have went after the terrorists themselves, aligned ourselves with a universally appalled world, and treated them as the gnats at a picnic they are. We'd now be focused on global issues like disease, the environment, and working towards more places resembling Ireland than making more places resemble Somalia.

A viral infection in a herd of cattle can cause a lot of damage. Do you blow up the barn, the farmhouse, and the neighbors?

Keep on blogging, friends...I guess we know who the Patriots are. And we know who the Tories are, too.

Blessed indeed are the peacemakers, for they will survive and endure.