Great line of the day

On this Easter Sunday, Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake writes a powerful piece about the US justice department and ex-employee Monica Goodling's perception that in remaking the department in Bush's image she was somehow doing God's work. Of State…And Church:

. . . Someone forgot to tell Goodling and her fellow Bushies that The Bible is not a text that was ever meant to be cherry-picked as a justification for being able to screw over whomever you please, or as an excuse to be able to do whatever you want, grasping for promotions and chits from the powerful along the way.
Perhaps a review of The Ten Commandments would have helped — the first commandment reads: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." That includes Presidents who say they talk to God, as well as their political power broker minions, too, and not just golden calves — and working hard to curry favor with any of the above is an act that worships power and what you can get from it. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who thinks securing earthly power, consolidating one's position and amassing a number of favors owed to you that you can call in when you need them is the point of existence is worshiping at the altar of Gordon Gekko.
Decency and ethics always has a place in public service. But simply slapping a "Christian" label on yourself is not an excuse for grasping, greedy behavior because you have some back-of-your-mind understanding that you can ask forgiveness for your piss poor behavior later. That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc justification, and it doesn't fly. God has not rewarded you with the promotion — you earned it all on your own by stabbing a whole lot of people in the back and, thereby, appealing to the crowd of malignant political minions who were looking for just such a self-serving, grasping person to stab a few more people in the back. Congratulations, Monica, you've lived up to the very low standard of Karl Rove.

Emphasis mine.

Baghdad, Indiana

Some idiot Republican congressman said that shopping in Baghdad was just like going to a market in Indiana. So the LA Times runs this description of an Indiana family shopping expedition by Brooklyn writer John Kenney:

My wife came into the living room wearing a Kevlar vest, helmet and night-vision goggles.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Have you completely forgotten, silly head? We're going to the market."
I placed my hand at my head. I'd been so caught up in stitching a minor wound I'd received earlier in the day after going to an outdoor fruit stand that I had completely forgotten.
"I'm a dope, aren't I?" I said, chuckling, slowly shaking my head back and forth. She chuckled too, also shaking her head. We both chuckled. Then I winced from where a stitch popped.
Carol helped the boys get ready, putting on their sneakers and body armor. I phoned the Indiana National Guard so that they could radio the 434th Special Air Wing at Grissom Air Force Base, which in turn scrambled two F-14 Tomcats. Then we hopped in the wagon.
Carol and I moved to Muncie from Detroit. Frankly, we were tired of the noise, the dirt and the crime. Here, you feel so safe, as long as you move very quickly through the market, keep your head down and have appropriate air cover.
Carol handed each of the boys — 8 and 5, and a handful, let me tell you — a juice box, a Xanax and personalized Navy SEAL-issue GPS systems.
"Dad?" said Kevin, our 8-year-old, from the back seat.
"Yes, Kev," I said.
"Can we go to that cotton candy stand again?"
The F-14s flew by low. Each of us activated our earpieces and hand-held mini walkie-talkies, agreed on a frequency, and I slowed the car to 15 mph as Carol and the boys opened the doors and rolled out, taking cover under shrubbery near the Bibb lettuce stand (the boys love salad!).
So far, so good.
I hit the gas and spun the car and parked in a ditch that had once been a Tasty Donut before a tactical nuclear weapon had decimated it. Great parking space, though.
I saw my neighbor, Larry, under his car, from the looks of it a spanking-new Bradley fighting vehicle. "Snipers today," Larry said with a smile.
"Nice ride, Larry," I said as I dove under the car, a sniper's bullet exploding inches away from my foot. "Looks solid."
"The hull is constructed of welded aluminum and spaced laminate armor," he said, burying his head in the dirt as another round came in. "The Israelis use them. I had an Explorer, but it was blown to bits last time I went out for garbage bags."
"Roomy?"
"Ton of room. Carries three crew, commander, gunner and driver, plus six fully equipped infantrymen. Mileage is awful, but with all the space in the back, it's great for the market."
I borrowed his high-power binoculars to check on the family's progress.
Kevin and his little brother had successfully bought lettuce, fruit and homemade jams before a particularly well-placed rocket-propelled grenade destroyed the stand (the owner managed to avoid the hit and began rebuilding immediately, as weekends are, obviously, his busiest time).
Carol, I noticed, had found cover behind the wall of a largely destroyed warehouse. A sniper had a bead on the glint from her eyeglasses, which the afternoon sunshine had caught (Indiana is known for its beautiful summers).
Larry asked me to cover him, and he rolled out from under the BFV and hopped in. I activated heavy smoke bombs, and his car tore out of the field. I made it back to my car as Larry's choppers came in low over the market, taking heavy fire and destroying the sniper's den (about time, thank you very much) as well as a Toys R Us that was closed for renovation.
I could see the smoke in the rear-view mirror when Carol dove onto the hood, managing to hold onto the bundles (that woman never ceases to amaze me). I hit the brakes and she got in quickly.
"You put on face paint," I said, giving her a quick kiss.
"You wouldn't believe how crowded it was," she said, panting. "I saw Margie Hynes. Boy, has she put on weight."
A CBU-52B cluster bomb exploded to our left, and I hit the gas. We could see the boys ahead, waving flares in the dense smoke. I didn't stop the car completely. Kevin threw Chip in first, then jumped in himself.
Both immediately vomited from the smoke.
"You kids have fun?" Carol asked.
"Yeah!" said Chip.
"He was holding a loaf of bread and it got blown out of his hand!"
"It was so awesome, Mum."
We all laughed. Really hard. That's how shopping is in Indiana in the summer. It's just fun. It's fun and safe and hopeful and full of warm and welcoming Indianans and insurgents and snipers and bombs.
"Oh darn," Carol said.
"What is it, honey?"
"We forgot milk."

You have to see it to believe it

My favorite, from the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities at the Going Jesus website.

Great line of the day

Echidne gives us girls some Nifty Things To Do With Plastic Milk Jugs -- here's a particularly good one:

Save six plastic milk jugs and cut off the tops so that you end up with what looks like plastic tumblers. These are excellent wedding gifts. You can personalize them by painting pictures of foods on the sides. I always send these to those brides and grooms who only give me a very pricey wedding-gift list to shop from. That way they know I cared enough to give them something home-made and different. Or so I think, as I usually don't hear from them again.

Emphasis mine.
And for bridezilla stories, check out these greedy couples.

Guess who's coming to Regina?

Lorne Calvert announced today that Al Gore is coming to Regina. On the radio this morning, I heard talk show host John Gormley and some of his listeners apparently expressing some doubt about whether the tickets would sell.
Of course they will -- he sold out at the University of Toronto in minutes.
And don't I wish that I could go, too.
I also heard a lot of claptrap on the radio about whether people "believe" in global warming or not.
It's not a religion, people. It's not a political party.
It's just the truth, though an inconvenient one.
I don't get why some right-wingers insist on trying to turn global warming into a partisan issue. Reading the comments over at Small Dead Animals and listening to the phone calls on Gormley, some people act like global warming is just another political belief --like, say, marketing boards and single-payer health care and proportional representation -- rather than a scientific reality. Just because a Democrat, Al Gore, is trying to educate people about global warming, they seem to think only "lefties" could "believe" in global warming just like only "lefties" "believe" in taxing corporate profits, while the right-thinking right wing has to scorn and deride global warming just like it scorns and derides business tax increases.
Discuss the science, if you will -- as scientists have been doing for the last decade, finally concluding that the evidence is overwhelming and unmistakable -- but global warming is simply not a "left-right" issue. More a "life-death" issue, really
And don't get me started on the manufactured "controversy" about how much energy Al Gore uses personally.
How much do you use -- yes, you there with the SUV and the boat and the cabin? Or how about you over there, hiding behind the washer-dryer set you got after your vacation in Mexico?
Al Gore lives in a large house and wears a tuxedo and charges a speaking fee, so his political opponents seem to think they can accuse him of being some sort of hypocrite -- I guess he's supposed to be holier than thou and travel by horse and buggy (or at least fly coach) and wear some ratty old tweed jacket and live in a crummy house, just to conform to some archaic stereotype of what a "leftie" is -- how dare a "leftie" be wealthy?
Gore does set an example by paying more than $5,000 a year for energy offsets, a poorly-understood concept which is basically what Kyoto also promotes on a much larger scale, I think, with the goal of reducing overall world energy usage. And it's the whole world that Gore cares about -- he doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in wasting his personal energies on taking cheap shots at his political opponents.

Trust them? I don't think so

ABC News says we should trust their hysterical story about Iran enriching uranium just because they say so. But it turns out this story was authored by the same ABC reporters, Brian Ross and Chris Isham, who claimed in October 2001 that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the anthrax attacks. In fact, Ross was also one of the primary promoters of Cheney's much-beloved "Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi spy in Prague" myth.
Glenn Greenwald tracked it down. The senior VP of ABC News said the unsourced assertion that Iran is enriching uranium at a furious pace was a credible story because the reporters were "very reliable":

In response to my central point -- that a story of this magnitude and potential impact should not be passed on without at least some information enabling an assessment of the credibility of the sources (or, at the very least, should include an explanation as to why such information was being concealed) -- Schneider's response was that there is a way for the reader to assess the credibility of the story. Namely, because ABC News and the reporters in question have "proven over a long period of time" that they are "very reliable" ...

Yeah. Reliably wrong!

Kinky

Remember this?
Glenn Greenwald calls neocon foreign policy the Abu Grahib Theory of Foreign Affairs. And yes, that is a useful construct in analyzing whether a foreign policy initiative actually makes sense or is just indulging a fantasy of power or submission.
But I think its actually more accurate to describe this with an S & M analogy.
When it comes to foreign "relations", the neocons appear to enjoy both the S and the M, the grovelling and the whipping -- wallowing in a mythology of American weakness, while indulging in Ilsa the She-Wolf fantasies of whipping the world into shape and bending all nations to her will.
Just look at the language we're always using to describe the Iraq war -- there's the "surge" in Iraq (which should, I think, be titled "Operation Big Swinging Dick" because that's whose idea it was and that's the idea of it.) Then there is the Bush administration's horror of Democratic attempts to "withdraw", which the Republicans describe as a a "slow bleed strategy".
Hmmm, sounds kinda kinky, doesn't it?
And here (via Greenwald) are Newt Gingrich and Hugh Hewitt talking about how the United States should whip the Iranians if any American sailors are ever arrested:

HH: So how long would you give them, to give them that ultimatum, the Iranians?
NG: I would literally do that. I would say to them, I would right now say to them privately, within the next week, your refinery will no longer work. And within the following week, there will be no tankers arriving. Now if you would like to avoid being humiliated publicly, we recommend you calmly and quietly give them back now. But frankly, if you'd prefer to show the planet that you're tiny and we're not, we're prepared to simply cut off your economy, and allow you to go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts, because you will have no gasoline left.
HH: I agree with that 100%.

Emphasis mine. So Newt Gingrich, who thinks he should be president, would "humiliate" Iran "to show the planet that you're tiny and we're not".
Hmmm, sounds kinda kinky to me.
Greenwald says:

. . . what it's all about -- everything -- is, as Newt put it: we must "show the planet that you're tiny and we're not."
Showing the planet that they're "tiny and we're not" really does sum up, almost completely, the entire neoconservative compulsion, which is the same thing as neoconservatism itself. As I've noted before, they talk about every foreign policy issue with themes of dominance, submission and humiliation as the centerpiece. It's the Abu Grahib Theory of Foreign Affairs, and it actually is quite uncomfortable even to read.

Hmmm, dominance and submission, sounds kinda kinky.
Safe word banana.

Throwing things at Karl Rove

Karl Rove may be a wow with the Beltway journalists but with university students, not so much:

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.
The students then got on the ground and laid down in front of his car as a protest.
The students said security officials picked them up and carried them away so Rove could leave.
Police said they have dealt with a lot of protests on campus and this one was handled peacefully.
No one was arrested.

I'll bet the university faculty vote to give them each a medal.

I read the news today, oh boy

Playing cowboys in Iraq: Now the Brits are saying their sailors were captured in retaliation for the provacative US raid on the Iran consultate in Kurdistan in January -

The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Dave has comments on this story, too.

Gonzo journalism: My reaction to this story about how Rudi Gulianai's wife once had a job demonstrating surgical staplers for veterinarians is So What?

The Big Hurt: Here's the Blue Jays commercial that caused all the fuss. Seems a bit of an over-reaction to me.

Deja vu all over again: Glenn Greenwald suspects that ABC's hysterical "scoop" about Iran's nuclear capacity is just a bunch of hogwash -- particularly considering that the whole story is sourced to "sources". I bet I know where one of those sources is hiding.

One minor point about the whole US attorneys scandal: One of the reasons all those US attorneys were fired was that the Bush administration could replace them without congressional hearings, because of a provision slipped into the 2001 Patriot Act which nobody knew about because no one had ever actually read the Act. So what I wonder is this -- has anyone read the Patriot Act NOW? And what other unnecessary, authoritatian outrages were also slipped into it at midnight by the Bush administration? I'm sure there is more -- with these guys, there's always more.

Great line of the day

Atrios writes about "those who think political power and discourse should be in the hands of elites, and those who think otherwise:"

There's a large amount of paternalistic elitism which runs through many, the belief that governance is too important for the orthodontists and the rest of the rabble to have much to do with it and that essentially Democracy is a nice fantasy we should maintain without embracing the reality.
It's an argument which would have more merit if the elites in our discourse hadn't gotten basically everything wrong over the past decade.

Yeah, that's for sure. Emphasis mine.

1.2 million have viewed "otters holding hands"

Failing the test

Glenn Greenwald quotes Andrew Sullivan quoting Winston Churchill:

...the great principle of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the British people for ordinary individuals against the state. The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments ... Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy. This is really the test of civilisation.

Emphasis mine.
On this test, the Republican presidential candidates fail.
Romney:

Crane [Cato Institute President Ed Crane] asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Guiliani:

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

Well, that's magnanimous, isn't it? As Sullivan writes:

America is now failing that test. And the Republican party has lost not only its own soul; it is busy mortgaging the soul of America and the West as a whole. On this, there can be no compromise. Until a leading Republican commits to the full restoration of habeas corpus for American citizens, whether the executive considers them an "enemy combatant" or not, no one who loves freedom can support the GOP. In fact, any lover of freedom should consider it a duty to defeat them.

My son wanted me to watch a documentary on Guantanamo the other night but I couldn't watch it -- I said to him that I find it so sad and deeply upsetting, what has happened to America, what America has done to itself, that sometimes I can hardly bear it.

Hmmmm.... chocolate

As I read the news about the chocolate Jesus, some irreverent words from these irreverent verses kept playing in my head:
I don't care if it rains or freezes
'Long as I got my plastic chocolate Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far. . . .
Git yourself a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell . . .
She don't slip and she don't slide
Cuz her butt is magnetized. . .
Guaranteeing I won't go to Hell . . .

So I agree with this post from olvizi at Echidene:

Can you believe that Matt Semler, the now former director of the Lab Gallery didn’t know exactly what would result from the aborted “My Sweet Lord” exhibit? That’s the one with the big chocolate Jesus on the cross - without loincloth - just to gild the lily. It was announced for New York City, the home base of America’s most reliable rent-a-reactionary, Bill Donohue. Certainly someone in Semler’s profession had noticed his performance art on at least one occasion, including his “Sensations” reaction. He's the Christo of "christianity". So, I’ve got very little sympathy for Semler's resignation even as I wearily roll my eyes and say “Yes, yes. Of course it is a matter of free speech”, to which a polite person wouldn’t add, no matter how juvenile the message was.
The work of “art” is apparently one of a number of rather silly sounding pieces by Cosimo Cavallario. His previous production includes large installations featuring 5 tons of pepper jack sprayed on a Wyoming house and a four poster bed made of ham, sounds more hors’ d’oeuvre than oeuvre. . . . I haven’t read anywhere but the edible aspect of the chocolate would invite the suspicion that it was an Easter season satire on Catholic communion. If that didn’t occur to the artiste, he’s just one dumb bunny.

In the traditional Canadian Easter, the chocolate bunny ears are always eaten first.

There's no crying in baseball

People will come