~ new jersey transit quote:
“i don’t want to be close to strangers.”
(…on the new jersey transit!)
~ new jersey transit quote:
“i don’t want to be close to strangers.”
(…on the new jersey transit!)
“did you hear about this marine who killed an unarmed wounded guy in iraq?”
“yes. that’s just stupid.”
“agreed…though one might say that the entire set of circumstances which put a US marine in the position to shoot anyone in fallujah is ‘stupid'”
could this be as stupid as the iraq debacle being superseded by headlines like ‘some rappers fight at the vibe awards’ or ‘someone cares that an ad for ‘desperate housewives’ was aired during a football game’? this is also stupid: the house of representatives rewrites rules about what to do when one of them is indicted whenever one of their own, such as republican tom delay, actually gets indicted. we wish that people could rewrite laws about downloading movies and songs and comic books every time they get caught downloading movies and songs and comic books.
~ other stupid headlines: ‘Kerry Says He’s Not Ruling Out Another Run’
~ in the past we have stated our skepticism of the usefulness of the electoral process in our representative democracy. we give one of the corporations a chance that it can overcome a more dangerous corporation. if there is any doubt that the corrupt thugs in the republican party will relinquish power honourably, quietly, or peacefully, take a look at voter fraud, silver state style:
Clark County Election Dept.
(Oct. 12) — Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
“We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assistant to get those from me,” said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee. klas-tv.com
the ‘Voters Outreach of America’ is currently working in oregon, so any of our readers there should find their voter drives and encourage people to find someplace more trustworthy to register to vote and to watch ‘Voters Outreach’ to make sure that their windows aren’t smashed and their vans do not somehow burst into flames.
~ similar bullshit in minnesota: “Hundreds of completed voter registration cards found stashed in car”[w]
~ the discussion over the debates is overwhelming; something can always be added, but we find that interest is already saturated. so, avoiding the post-debate debates on policy and style, we will mention a couple of personal points/grievances here, so that one might get a sense of what made us grin and/or hammer the arm rest with a clenched fist:
here is the aforementioned quote concerning the supreme court, to save you the trouble of rereading the transcript.
john kerry: A few years ago, when he came to office, the president said, these are his words: What we need are some good conservative judges on the courts. And he said also that his two favorite justices are Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas. So you get a pretty good sense of where he’s heading if he were to appoint somebody.
Now, here’s what I believe. I don’t believe we need a good conservative judge and I don’t believe we need a good liberal judge. I don’t believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side. I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, a good justice, is that when you’re reading their decision, their opinion, you can’t tell if it’s written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you’re reading a good judicial decision.
What I want to find if I am privileged to have the opportunity to do it and the Supreme Court of the United States is at stake in this race, ladies and gentlemen, the future of things that matter to you in terms of civil rights: what kind of Justice Department you’ll have, whether we’ll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women’s rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman’s right to choose be protected? These are our constitutional rights.
And I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law.
for the sake of equal time, we have included bush’s quote regarding the supreme court and personal opinion. the fact that that the Pledge of Allegiance is not mentioned in the constitution, and is therefore not above being destroyed by the supreme court, not withstanding, it is baffling to us how bush is able to state that he is opposed to personal opinion entering judicial decisions then give his personal opinion on the pledge as a test for who may be a justice, without actually having the lobes of his brain move in opposite directions. in any event, as stated, you can not strictly interpret the constitution concerning the pledge, because the pledge ain’t in there! the issue is about the trappings of a state religion, not about the pledge. as bush might say when someone says they will spend responsibly: ‘it doesn’t make any sense’.
george w bush: I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.
Uh, let me give you a couple of examples I guess of the kind of person I wouldn’t pick. I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words ‘under God’ in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process, as opposed to strict interpretation of the Constitution.
~ as if to drive home our point that they* will say any crazy thing to make us believe that night is day and that cats are dogs, our secretary of defense spins this web:
“We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What’s the difference? We just didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night.” –donald rumsfeld
what is the punchline here? that there is a difference between random urban crime and methodical mechanized killing of 1,040+ dead american troops and 10,000+ iraqi civilians? or is it that if we shouldn’t be concerned about the death in iraq then by extension we must also think it acceptable that “200 or 300 or 400” citizens are killed in our cities each year?
remember when we used to employ eunuchs to guard our harems? a similar tactic should be used for secretaries of defense; it is not necessary that they be castrated, but rather they need to not be deranged psychos who don’t let death weigh heavily on their consciences.
* republicans, conservatives, evangelicals, neocons, fundamentalists, right wing are not always the same thing; we need a term than encompasses all of them, the way ‘liberal’ has been reconstructed to mean anything that ‘the right’ thinks is bad.
~ during a round table discussion in which we were recently engaged, it was mentioned that the daughter of the head of the Christian coalition in georgia is a lesbian. this was deemed remarkable as it was emblematic of hypocrisy. the question was about how a mother could simultaneously promote family values whilst condemning her own daughter as a hedonist.
it was mentioned that the excuse used by people like this mother is that she promotes the ideal rather than the reality. this dovetails with the ‘do as i say not as i do’ homily, which parents have made more famous every time their kids drink and curse.
this interests us because it helps make clear how the right—evangelicals, republicans, conservatives—can make unflinchingly a statement that contradicts factual evidence and/or previous statements—for example, bush referring to iraq and afghanistan, which have not had elections since we toppled their governments, as ‘democracies’ while he berates the united nations. it seems to us that the right has found a loophole in which they are absolved of responsibility.
it is one thing for bush to refrain from holding press conferences and to refuse to answer questions at his rallies, as it keeps from being ‘under the spot’, but the very excuse that he should not be expected to think on his feet is frightening considering the responsibilities of a commander-in-chief in a nuclear armed world. if you always hold an ideal and a plan, then you should never be afraid of a question as it means you will always have an answer. some answers might make you unpopular, but then you at least should know what those answers would be and how to avoid them. by offering no answers, you reveal that not only do you not know what is going on; you don’t have an idea about what should be going on.
the republicans have made some amazing statements over the past couple of weeks, such as g.norquist saying the Americans who fought in World War 2 ‘defended anti-American policies’ or d.hastert asserting that g.soros has gotten his billions from ‘drug groups’ or d.cheney telling us that kerry’s criticism of the mistakes in iraq ‘encourages more violence’ or that bibles will be banned if kerry becomes president. if anyone ever bothers to ask them how they can say such nonsensical things, they are able to confidently shrug or snort and convert the listener into the one who is making a mistake.
this would be a quaintly amusing trait, if it were not leading to needless violence and deaths. bush is telling us that the cia is ‘just guessing’ that there are problems in iraq, despite senators from his own party warning us of the danger of the current strategy—or lack thereof—while the u.n. is repeating that there can not be elections in january if the current situation persists. as long as the administration is grinning on tv and saying that everything is going great while we ‘march towards’ …something, the problem is not so much that americans are tricked into thinking that everything is going well as much as it is that bush and company think that tricking americans is the only job at hand. rather than address the cause of the danger, they will merely cover the symptoms. as long as they tout the ideal as reality, they will avoid looking at the situation of soldiers being shredded and dismembered by roadside bombs while they drive around waiting for…something. looking at the original excuse, it might not be a loophole at all; it could be what they truly believe.
~ regardless of my righteous bloviations on certain message boards, i do believe it is appropriate to use the term ‘stupid’ when describing political actions in this country. some days there are multiple occurrences that are so stupid that you don’t know which is the most stupid:
~ the first two balance out, we suppose; as long as we are keeping threats like the ex-cat stevens out of the country, we can afford to have an incompetent man like porter goss head the c.i.a.
~ as to the third issue, our ex-pat readers may use myvotewillcount.com [w] in order to cast their ballots from agentina, angola, and the azores. then send us a postcard.
~ we have doubts that anyone is reading both the lines on this page and the new york post, but anyone who has crossed this threshold would have noticed the unrestrained glee with which they have ‘reported’ the killing in iraq of nick berg of philadelphia. the enthusiasm of a recent editorial that calls for the ‘total annihilation’ of the ‘thugs’ reminds us of a pornographic comic we once perused at the 1986 atlanta fantasy fair in which a police detective is depicted masturbating moments before shooting a serial killer in the head.
as the ny post has undoubtedly spent the last couple of weeks confused as to how to turn into flag waving headlines the stories of america’s abuse, rape, and murder of its prisoners, they seem to welcome this chance offered by the taped beheading of a an american to clean the slate – to put all that boring, mucky abuse scandal behind us. americans’ attention spans are limited, and the post understands that most people are incapable of maintaining thoughts on both the premeditated, systemic abuse by the american military upon thousands of iraqi detainees (70-90% of whom had been mistakenly arrested) and on insurgents who are so twisted as to think the spectacle killing of a free lance american is a legitimate method of defending their homeland, race, religion, or something.
the angry red planet knows that some people are able to hold two or more thoughts at one time, that the universe is too complex for tabloid format, that sometimes you have to eat limas for breakfast; those are for whom we are here.
~ major media peddlers seem to be telling us that the death of an american solider who turned down millions of football dollars to join the army is somehow more poignant or heartbreaking than the death of hundreds of men and women who were forced to join because of dearth of other economic options. we say that it is not.
~ regarding the pentagon vs. the memory hole [w]: if you are going to be ‘brave’ enough to send americans to their deaths, you should be brave enough to face their images when their remains are returned home.
~ a coffee bean and tea leaf can be seen in the latest ‘spider-man 2’ trailer. there are no coffee bean and tea leaf establishments in new york city.
~ dr. condoleeza rice must have said fifty (50) times that the administration didn’t know the ‘time, or place, when or where’ of the 2001 terrorist attacks. we can assume that everyone already is aware of this; since the attacks were allowed to happen, we must hope that the administration didn’t know about them in advance. however, given this yammering excuse for their past failure, the listener or critic can presume that administration will only take steps to prevent a future catastrophe if the perpetrators provide a complete spreadsheet of the logistics for their future actions.
why are these suits whining that the u.s. citizenry can not expect them to do their jobs unless the enemy, aka those who ‘hate freedom’, takes out an ad in the washington post, along with the marriage and funeral announcements, that declares when they will strike, so the government will have a chance to respond? dr. rice’s crew’s job is not to complain that they don’t know anything; their job is to know these things.
the fundamental question should be, ‘why were you unaware of this threat?’; the answer should not be an angry, ‘because we were unaware of this threat!!’.
yet, we thought that regular americans were crybabies.
also unsettling is today’s allusion to the notion that there are big problems down the road if iran pursues a course of nuclear capability. now, iran is a sovereign nation, albeit one with a corrupt regime, so why is it our business if they choose to build a nuclear arsenal, considering that france and china have their own? the answer given is that iran supports hamas and hizbollah. however, these groups are israel’s concern; in fact, hamas even mentioned recently that they have no plans to target americans. the only bone these guys might have to pick with us is that the u.s. supports israel’s illegal occupation of the west bank.
it wasn’t mentioned in so many words, but israel’s violations of international law are being transmuted into our problems and possible war with a nuclear-powered, fundamentalist iran. all this is in spite of the angry red planet’s boycott of tropical source chocolate.
if any readers want to contribute to the collection for this week’s $689 veterinarian bill; we accept paypal.