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Democratic control of the House AND Senate! This is a day to remember.
"Your president," I said, "cut funds for the levees, ignored the need to restore the wetlands which protected new Orleans for years, and then when the levees failed had to have a special picture show made for him to demonstrate how bad things were. But he didn't care because Orleanians aren't in the right party or class. He let people broil and drown in their own living rooms. Then he flew over it and said `Wow, things look pretty devastating from up here...I'll bet it's even worse down there." Then his buddies cranked up the propaganda machine. They tried to convince people that Orleanians weren't our kind of people and weren't worth saving. Look, there's a shirtless youth trying to break into a store (shown a million times). They blamed it on Blanco and Nagin. Blanco and Nagin couldn't do jackshit. This was the worst natural disaster in American history. Only the Federal Government had the power and resources to rescue these people, to plug the leaks, to attempt to drain the city and to save New Orleans. But it was more important to him to stick to his message: government is bad and will not help you. Turn to the churches. They posed him in front of church after putting stage lights on it, and he promised that he would bring back New Orleans better than ever. It's a year later. They still haven't even fixed the levees back the way they were BEFORE Katrina, and they are lying and telling people that they are. Are the Dutch going to let Amsterdam fall to rubble because it is below sea-level? Are the Italians going to kiss-off Venice? Look. This is
not just a half a city of half a million people. It is a CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT city of half a million people. The fact that you are willing to let it go says a lot about you and how far our country has declined in the care of people like you. I believe we are our brother's keeper. That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats. You think it's every man for himself. We think we are in this together. That's the difference. What New Orleans needs right now more than anything is a levee. The money to do that is in Iraq. Please don't vote Republican again."
As we were discussing last night, since Ned Lamont won the Connecticut Senate primary, the intervening six days have seen the Republican party going out of its way to show its true colors with regards to its (very) thinly veiled racist agenda and its intolerance toward people of color and white people who support them. Of course, it goes way beyond that, but that’s as good a place to start as any.
The bottom line is that the Republican party is an elite club for wealthy whites and token minorities who will join their ranks and spew racist swill alongside their white brethren. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar, and anyone (like Ann Coulter or Michelle MalKKKin) who insists that liberals are the real racists is either mentally ill or they’re simply being willfully obtuse.
But let’s look at the evidence, shall we?
Back in April, this blog featured a series of posts dedicated to exposing the writhing grub-white underbelly of modern GOP racism in the blogging world and in the world of talk radio and television news and beyond. All the posts in the series were outstanding, and the message that came blaring through loud and clear at the end of the series was that today’s Republican party is merely a JC Penney White Sale away from its cross-burning, lynching, Jim Crow roots. A mere 40 years separate us from the forced integration of the southern states, when segregationist Democrats in the south crossed party lines to become Republicans and moderate Republicans opposed to American apartheid left the GOP to become Democrats.
40 years is not a very long time. Many of the wealthy white men in positions of power within the GOP made their political fortunes in this era and today, from their perches high on their ivory towers of privilege, they continue to push policy and political initiatives which routinely disenfranchise minority Americans. Who could forget Trent Lott’s ham-fisted attempt to justify the segregationist views of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign?
"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said at last week’s party.
Reality-based English translation: "These problems" equals "uppity ni&&@rs", i.e., "If Strom Thurmond had won the presidential race and upheld racial segregation in this country, fat white chucklefucks like me would have a lot easier time maintaining our choke-hold on the reins of power."
The RNC clean-up squads were dispatched, Lott was forced to apologize, and faced a nominal punishment, as is the likely fate of Virginia Republican George Allen, who is currently under fire for calling a 20-year-old Virginia man "Monkey Boy" in Tunisian slang and "welcoming" him to America, because OBVIOUSLY a brown-skinned liberal person couldn’t actually be born and raised in lily-white Virginia! Of course, the staffer, S. R. Siddarth was born and raised in Virginia, but to a Real Republican, that’s simply not enough. You have to be born and raised in America with skin whiter than Ivory Soap to be a "Real American" like George Felix Allen, Timothy McVeigh, or Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Then take into account the push by a group of southern Republicans to derail the Voting Rights Act earlier this summer, which, thankfully, failed. But how about my own state’s Photo ID voting requirements, which are being pushed on the public by the same legislators opposed to the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and which is vigorously opposed by state Democrats, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other progressive organizations. Not to mention the staggering indifference shown by FEMA and the administration toward the stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina. Mike Chertoff had to be told in a live interview by NPR’s Robert Siegel that the Convention Center was even there, let alone that a few thousand people were trapped there in desperate hunger, filth, and fear.
But if you back up and look at the even bigger picture, the Republican party’s entire 2006 electoral agenda is based around punishing people for not being white. Republicans on Immigration equals Stop the Evil Brown-Skinned Latino Hordes from Coming Here to Live. Republicans on Terrorism equals Stop the Evil Brown-Skinned Arabs and Islamic Asians from Blowing Up Our Planes and Bridges. Republicans on Ned Lamont equals PLEASE Stop the Evil Black Voters from Banding Together and Forming a Legitimate Threat to Our All-White Boys’ Club. The time has come to punch through their codified euphemisms and strike at the truth of their rhetoric. Republicans are melanin-ophobics.
Kanye West was right. Republicans are the Party of Racism. So, start pinning them to the wall on it. Ask a Republican, "Why do you hate black people?" or "Why are you so scared of Mexicans?" or "Why do you think that all Arabs are terrorists?"
REPUBLICANS ARE RACIST FUCKERS. STOP LETTING THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS SHIT.
Ask Ann Coulter what she really means about Maxine Waters and Affirmative Action, or MalKKKin and her Reconquistas. Ask George Allen why he calls brown-skinned people monkeys. Ask the Weakly Standard what the fushizzuck they meant by that stupid cover with Al Sharpton as Step N Fetchit.
The gilmpses of Old School White Fright we get when these dullards slip up and speak their minds are not aberrations. It’s when the real soul of the Party of Bigots slips its leash and evades its handlers and jumps out, however briefly, for us all to see. Then the handlers and spinners come out and tell us, "You saw nothing! You heard nothing! The views Senator Whitey McCracker espoused in his unfortunate remarks do NOT represent the views of the GOP and blah de blah diddy blah…"
And that’s the big lie. Is your skin is a half-tone darker than a tan paper bag? More? Then, my friend, you are The Enemy to the Republican Party. Unless of course, you want to act, dress, think, talk, and legislate from a position somewhere to the right of Adolph Eichmann, THEN (and only then) are you welcome in the Republican tent, but first you have to be willing to sell out and actively work against other minority people. Only then do you become the kind of useful idiot the Republicans so desperately want on their side.
So, Firedogs, let’s call them out. Coulter, MalKKKin, Glenn Beck, William Bennett, George F. Allen, Krauthammer, Kristol, and Lott (oh, my!), Limbaugh, Hannity, John Gibson, and all the rest. It’s time for them to know that we see through their thin layer of PR spin all the way to the ugly all-white heart of racist, Repugnican America. This is 2006, fer fuck’s sake! Plantation America is no longer a viable concept. Unacceptable. And it’s up to us to raise the necessary Hell to call the public’s attention to the true, viciously exclusionary nature of the Reich Wing.
ATTACK!! ATTACK!! ATTAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!
Who’s with me?
We’ve now got people at airports being prevented from boarding a plane with a bottle of Listerine, all so they can fly in complete safety and comfort while sitting on top of a cargo hold full of luggage and boxes that no one has bothered to inspect.
Big Dig Possible Defect Count Quadrupled
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By GLEN JOHNSON Associated Press Writer
July 13,2006 BOSTON -- Inspectors on Thursday quadrupled to 240 the number of possible ceiling bolt problems in a Big Dig tunnel where a woman was crushed by falling concrete, a still-closed section at the center of Gov. Mitt Romney's push to oversee the safety of the troubled project.
The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority said inspectors found additional bolt assemblies that were separating from 3-ton concrete roof panels, raising the number of defects over previous inspections that found 60 defects. The earlier defects were enough for officials to order a sweeping review of every roadway, tunnel and bridge in Boston's entire highway system.
Michael Lewis, director of the Big Dig, said inspectors found 68 suspect bolt assemblies over the westbound lanes of a connector tunnel providing the main route to Logan Airport. Forty-five more were discovered in a lane carrying carpool traffic, as well as 69 in ramps connecting two interstate highways.
June 27,2006 LONDON -- Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive either...
..."I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I've always planned seven books, and I want to finish on seven books," Rowling said Monday on TV here.
..."The final chapter is hidden away, although it's now changed very slightly. One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn't intend to die," she said. "A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil here. They don't target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well, I do."
Even when they meet privately and talk, as we have boasted, about ‘politics and people, war and peace, barbarism and civilization’, yet they evade and conceal. But it is so important to accustom ourselves to the duties of free speech, for without private there can be no public freedom, that we must try to uncover this fear and to face it. What then can be the nature of the fear that still makes concealment necessary between educated people and reduces our boasted freedom to a farce? ... Again there are three dots; again they represent a gulf—of silence this time, of silence inspired by fear. -- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Marines Corps investigates song about killing civilians
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A music video posted on the Internet that tells a tale about a U.S. Marine killing members of an Iraqi family is being condemned by an Islamic group and investigated by the Marine Corps.
The four-minute song, "Hadji Girl," appears to be sung by a Marine in front of a cheering audience. The lyrics talk about the Marine gunning down members of an Iraqi woman's family after they confront him with automatic weapons.
Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a spokesman for the Marines, said Tuesday that the Marines were aware of the video. Fazekas said officials don't know the identity of the singer or whether he is in the military.
The song was "inappropriate and contrary to the high standards expected of all Marines," Fazekas said. He said Marine officers are looking in to the matter.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that in light of recent allegations of atrocities committed by Marines in Haditha and other towns in Iraq, the video should be investigated by the Pentagon and Congress.
"The inappropriate actions of a few individuals should not be allowed to tarnish the reputation of all American military personnel," said Awad.
The video was posted anonymously on the www.youtube.com Web site, but was removed. It is still available on CAIR's web site, www.cair-net.org. A hadji is a pilgrim who journeys to Mecca. CAIR said the word has been used as a disparaging term by U.S. troops in Iraq.
"The video is not reflective of the tremendous sacrifices and dedication demonstrated, on a daily basis, by tens of thousands of Marines who have assisted the Iraqi people in gaining their freedom," Fazekas said. "We agree with the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations that the inappropriate actions of a few individuals should not tarnish the reputation of all American military personnel."
The singer is shown playing a guitar and singing about meeting an Iraqi woman and then being confronted by her brother and father, who have guns. The lyrics describe the Marine pulling the woman's little sister in front of him and watching blood spray from her head.
He then sings about blowing the father and brother "to eternity."
Defense officials are investigating allegations that U.S. Marines massacred as many as two dozen unarmed civilians in Haditha last November. Another probe is under way into charges that U.S. troops pulled an unarmed Iraqi man from his home in Hamandiya in late April and shot him to death without provocation.
Bodies of Missing U.S. Soldiers Recovered
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By KIM GAMEL Associated Press Writer
June 20, 2006 BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The bodies of two U.S. soldiers reported captured last week have been recovered, and an Iraqi defense ministry official said Tuesday the men were "killed in a barbaric way." The U.S. military said the remains were believed to be those of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore.Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said U.S. forces -- part of a search involving some 8,000 American and Iraqi troops -- found the bodies late Monday near Youssifiyah, where they disappeared Friday. The bodies were recovered early Tuesday.
Caldwell said the cause of death was "undeterminable at this point," and that the bodies would be taken back to the United States for DNA tests to confirm the identities.
Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for killing the soldiers, and said the successor to slain terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had "slaughtered" them, according to a Web statement that could not be authenticated. The language in the statement suggested the men had been beheaded.
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.
Starving season
World hunger is by far the worst crisis humanity faces, and it's getting worse --especially in Africa. Until the West overcomes its apathy and works toward long-term solutions, millions of people -- many of them children -- will continue to die unnecessarily.
By Samuel Loewenberg
June 13, 2006 In a dust-blown clinic on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, scores of women crowd into a bunkerlike structure, clutching children with emaciated limbs and listless eyes. They have come to have their babies weighed. It is a tradition known to every parent. Here, the tradition has become a nightmare.
The medical staff take an infant named Bintow from the arms of his mother and place him in a black harness attached to a hand-held scale. He shrieks at the sudden discomfort, thrashing his arms and legs. His stomach bulges, all of his ribs are visible. The child is 10 months old. He weighs 9 pounds.
Bintow is lucky, as far as it goes. He is so badly underweight that he will receive an emergency ration: two weeks' worth of enriched cornmeal and oil. Only a third of the estimated 200 children at the center that day will receive care. There is simply not enough to go around.
XXL
It happens all the time. A couple buys an estate-size home with multiple rooms and lavish amenities. Two-story fireplaces. Palatial entryways with formal staircases. Soaring coffered ceilings. Arched floor-to-ceiling windows.. First they're thrilled, says Sheri Edsall, a Needham interior designer. Then "they're panic-stricken. They can't deal with that much house." But many Boston-area residents are learning to deal with it.
The New Rich
Bye-bye Brahmins. Flashy self-made millionaires are taking over Boston.
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 2006
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.Such has been the patient sufferance of these States; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King George is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Here's the facts, then:
- World Trade Center: Gone
- New Orleans: Drowned; abandoned
- Middle class: Disappearing
- Rich: Getting richer, thanks to tax cuts
- Poor: Screwed
- Environment: Raped
- Civil liberties: Obliterated
- Corporations: Fat and happy
- America's armed forces: Sent to die for no reason
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends,'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
[1842]
Here’s what happens when you live with a toddler: you find yourself actually saying things like this:
-- Please take the cheese out of your ear.
-- Will you stop standing on the Cheerios box?
-- Can you take the remote control out of your mouth?
-- Why are you trying to wedge your baby doll into the wine rack?
-- No, really, take the cheese out of your ear.
Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side. Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifing his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.
Tom Cruise may have found a way to keep Katie Holmes from violating the precepts of Scientology and shrieking in pain when she gives birth to their child.
It's a specially crafted adult pacifier, reports Star magazine.
Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.As someone with literally dozens of hotheaded, easily offended Sicilian relatives, I can tell you for a fact that to say "vaffanculo," accompanied by that flicking-the-hand-out-from-under-the-chin action, does not mean "(expletive) you." It actually means "go take it up the ass."
“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.
The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”