What a Bunch of Wankers

Kathy Griffin wins an award and in her acceptance speech makes fun of people who thank Jesus for winning awards. So what does a (supposed) Christian group do?

They spend over $90,000 on an ad to condemn her.

If they had $90,000 to throw away, why didn't they do something Christian with it? Like feed some poor people, help some homeless children, pay for medical treatment for someone who has no insurance?

No, they decided to waste it on a fucking ad.

To paraphrase a character in Hannah and her Sisters: if Jesus was here to see what is done in his name, he would never stop puking....

What She Said

From Shakesville:

That was the sound of my head hitting my desk after I read this load of codswallop:

Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson…in his first campaign stop in South Carolina, told a crowd of about 500 Republicans yesterday that he gained his values from "sitting around the kitchen table" with his parents and "the good Church of Christ."

Okay, first of all, I'd just like to point out, since the media certainly won't, that that doesn't have any intrinsic meaning. Everyone from Gandhi to Hitler could claim they got their values from "sitting around the kitchen table" with their parents, but that means diddlyshit unless one elucidates what, precisely, those values are. And as for "the good Church of Christ," well, same deal. What are the values of "the good Church of Christ," pray tell? Not all churches have the same values. Some churches aid and abet pedophiles; some break IRS tax exemption laws; some practice sex segregation; some kick out pregnant teens. Some churches practice institutionalized hatred of teh gayz, while some happily marry them. It's just such a load of honking bollocks to pretend that "I got my values from Ma, Pa, and Father Joe!" actually conveys anything real, other than a desire to pander to the lowest common denominator of unthinking douchebags in the whole of the electorate.

From the family album:
Fred having dinner with his parents and Christ

... umm, no... wait a minute...

that's from Larry Craig's album

Asshole

The blood of tens of thousands of people is on his head

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

On Sept. 18,2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

Two former CIA officials confirmed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. However, "the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it."

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

...
On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.",/blockquote>

...
The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."

...
"The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."

But, as we all know, you can only be impeached if you dissemble about blow jobs. Deceiving Congress, the United Nations, and other world leaders just doesn't count

That's Just Psycho

According to Democratic Presidential candidate, Bill Richardson, God wants Iowa to be the first presidential caucus:

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord should be the first caucus and primary,” Richardson, New Mexico’s governor said at the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic. “And I want you to know who was the first candidate to sign a pledge not to campaign anywhere if they got ahead of Iowa. It was Bill Richardson.”

What on earth was he smoking? That is not just crazy, it's pathetic.

Where are Josiah Bartlet and Matt Santos when you need them?



















Save us from idiotic politicians

What He Said

Not everyone is crazy. From Newsday.com

Remove Bush over war lies
Jimmy Breslin
August 26, 2007

There had been the sound of many feet on a Brooklyn street at the first funeral, of firefighter Joseph Graffa-gnino, and at the second funeral, of firefighter Robert Beddia, a fire engine sounded in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. In my office about an hour later, slips of paper came silently out of a machine, the slips coming from the Department of Defense and carrying the names and ages of the 14 soldiers who were killed in Iraq when their helicopter crashed. Four were under 21 and nine 25 or under. Of course the first thought was how the city at this time could handle such calamity if the 14 dead were New York firefighters or police officers. This gives a good view of the catastrophe that happens in Iraq, day after day.

But as the soldiers die at a time of national Alzheimer's, there was virtually no reaction to the 14.

When anybody you elect tries to end the war, Bush blocks all intentions with a veto or threats of a veto that prevent it. And his Supreme Court is ready to validate whatever he does, this court with its five Catholic justices, and a chief who falls on his face a couple of times that we know of.

Our politicians despair that there can be no way to override Bush and save our young and everybody of any age in Iraq.

Of course there is. By all the energy and dignified disgust of a nation that needs it to keep any semblance of greatness, there is an extraordinary need for an impeachment of this president and his vice president.

You start an impeachment with an investigator who starts to develop a case. That's what got Nixon out. He had the most expensive, elaborate defense in the world, and when they were pressed his assistants folded and Nixon quit. I wonder whether Bush and his people can do any better when pressed.

I have here in front of me a large number of pages that I keep for their significance. They are from a United States Senate hearing and are titled, "In Re Impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton."

He was only the 42nd person in our nation to make the commitment to "faithfully execute" the Office of the President and to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution."

He was being impeached over lying about girls.

Bush the President is our 43rd. He lied to the nation to get us into a war in Iraq that is without end. Every young person who has died leaves drops of blood on Bush's hands and those of everyone around him. He lied to the nation and daily he tries every greasy way to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Thus making his oath false.

Clinton's charges seem frivolous. But Bush appears to have committed high crimes and misdemeanors and must be thrown out of office in the disgrace that he is.

Bush, reminiscing the other day over something that further scatters the mind, compared the end of Vietnam with the Iraq war that thrills him so much because it makes him a wartime commander.

I don't know why Vietnam is on his mind. He skipped the thing to have his teeth fixed in Texas. Showing such utter confusion causes questions of how much evil he carries in his mind and how much of stimulants.

He raises the end of Vietnam. If you want to know what that was like, Bernie Edelman, who went from Flatbush to Chu Lai, yesterday opened the book, "Dear America," that he compiled with the New York Vietnam Veterans. The pages consist of letters written by veterans of Vietnam.

One is by Air Force Lt. Richard Van de Geer, a helicopter pilot assigned to assist in the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. This letter is on 15 May 1975, the day he was killed.

"The aircraft that landed on the Midway - landed about 50 feet away from mine - and the man who got out of the aircraft had been quoted approximately a week earlier as saying that any South Vietnamese who had left the country was a coward and that everybody should stay in South Vietnam and fight to the bitter end. This very same man was the first man to arrive on the USS Midway and to my knowledge the first to be recovered by the 7th Fleet. The man was Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky, vice president of the Republic of South Vietnam. Now I really don't have any personal feelings about the war here. I really don't care one way or the other in regard to who is right and who is wrong because that is a waste of time, a waste of thinking. But I did find myself feeling that I wish he had been shot down."

Officially, Lt. Van de Geer was the last man to die in the Vietnam War. His name is listed as last on the memorial in Washington. If Bush wonders from his dentist's chair about the end of Vietnam, Van de Geer gives you a fair idea.



















Postscript: Wow! Even the nuns are fed up.

Your Mothers Must Be So Proud

From Daily Kos:

According to U.S. congressman, Paul Kanjorski, in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he was summoned to the White House for a meeting. In the meeting, CIA officials showed him and other undecided representatives photos of what they said were unmanned Iraqi aircraft capable of attacking U.S. cities with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in order to convince
them to support the invasion of Iraq.

Turns out the photos were faked - they were actually taken in the desert of the U.S. southwest.

If this is true, heads should roll. But they won't. 'Cause bullshitting people is what this administration is all about.

Wackjobs Attack Each Other

From Editor & Publisher

Congressman Threatens Couple -- Over Letter to Editor

A couple who wrote a letter to the editor of a small community paper in Colorado were surprised to receive a threatening phone call at home complaining about it -- from a U.S. congressman.

Rep. Doug Lamborn left two voice mails after they questioned his acceptance of campaign contributions from the gambling industry. In one he said there would be "consequences" if the couple did not respond. In his messages, reprinted by the Denver Post today, Lamborn appeal to them as "brothers and sisters in Christ" and asked them to call him to discuss their "blatantly false" letter.

Jonathan Bartha is employed by the group Focus on the Family. "His wife, a board member of Falcon School District 49, worked for two months as a scheduler for candidate Jeff Crank during a bitter, six-way Republican primary race for the 5th Congressional District seat," the Post observed.

"We felt very threatened and intimidated, and quite frankly, scared," Anna Bartha told the Post. "It was just not anything we would ever anticipate an elected official would pursue or a way that an elected official would conduct himself.

"When asked what he meant when he said there would be "consequences," Lamborn told the Post: "When someone tells a lie, it just has bad consequences."

But the Post noted: "Three days after leaving the messages on the Barthas' voice mail, Lamborn wrote an open letter to Greg Garcia, chair of the El Paso County Republicans, asking him to investigate."

The following is a text of two voice messages that Lamborn left, as published by the Post.

*FIRST MESSAGE: "Hello, this is Doug Lamborn calling for either Jonathan or Anna. Something very serious has happened. There was a letter to the editor that you both put in your names to the editor of the Woodmen Edition and there is something that is blatantly false in that letter. "I would like to get together with you and show this to you and appeal to you as a brother and sister in Christ. You didn't give me that opportunity but I am happy to overlook that and deal with you on that level because I think that is the right thing to do and show you where you made a blatant, wrong statement. "Now there are consequences to this kind of thing, but I would like to work with you in a way that is best for everyone here concerned. So please call me at your earliest convenience. It is now 2:40 (p.m.) on Saturday afternoon.

SECOND MESSAGE: "Hello, this is Doug Lamborn again, I'm finishing up my message from a moment ago. I got cut off. It is critical that you get back to me as soon as possible on this because I'll be going back to Washington here in a few days and I have to make sure that this is resolved one way or another. And like I said I'd rather resolve this on a Scriptural level but if you are unwilling to do that I will be forced to take other steps, which I would rather not have to do. So please call me. This is essential. Call me by tonight, Saturday night and we can get together sometime Sunday afternoon."

Isn't That Special...

From the Washington Post:

In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter (pdf), the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were "grateful" for his staff's intervention to stop health officials from "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.
...




















Lobbyists know what's best for you, little girl...

Meds Can't Help When You're This Insane

This is so insane, my head exploded

Okay, the Texas dildo law was crazy but kind of amusing. This is just freaking insane and not the least bit amusing.

Via: Dispatches From the Culture Wars

The AP reports:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and was subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

Here's what Vance saw and reported to the FBI:

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqui insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, the Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iragi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

"It was a Wal-Mart for guns," he says. "It was all illegal and everyone knew it."

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know who to trust in Iraq.

Did they start investigating such clearly illegal activity that also puts our soldiers at greater risk? Nope. They threw Vance in a military prison and treated him like a terrorist:

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Bagdhad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics "reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants."

Vance and Ertel are hardly alone:

Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country's oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those sho have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

"If you do it, you will be destroyed," said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

"Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, 'Should I do this?' And my answer is no. If they're married, they'll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything," Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

"The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know," said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. "But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, 'Don't blow the whistle or we'll make your life hell."

"It's heartbreaking," Daley said. "There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It's a disgrace. Their lives get ruined."

Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authoroty, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

"It's just amazing how we say we want to remove fraud from our government, then we gag people who are just trying to stand up and do the right thing," she says.

In her demotion, her supervisors said she was performing poorly. "They just wanted to get rid of me," she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.

"You just don't have happy endings," said Weaver. "She was a wonderful example of a federal employee. They just completely creamed her. In the end, no one followed up, no one cared." But Greenhouse regrets nothing. "I have the courage to say what needs to be said. I paid the price," she says.

Then there is Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company - with which he was riefly associated - bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.

He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a fomer employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against hte now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.

It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fruad.

But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isaksona dn Bladwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.

Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.

"It's a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system, "said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. "I tried to help the government, and the government didn't seem to care."

The Dildo Diaries

Let's start this show with the Dildo Diaries, starring the incomparable Molly Ivins. The Texas dildo law is beyond insane and Texas politicians are certifiable.