(Gene Rayburn): Dumb Donald is so dumb…

(Audience, led by Brett Somers): How dumb is he?

Well, this isn’t Match Game 06, and the First Vice President of Industry and Peace, Donald Rumsfeld, aka, the Secretary of Defense, yesterday met the vets in Salt Lake City. He is evidently angry at everyone, save the Ministry of Truth. TheAP reports the following eloquent oration, a veritable Churchillian denunciation of Chanberlain, in the form denouncing those who oppose the Main Office’s branch of ops in Iraq, aka the war as having “moral and intellectual confusion.”

No, First Secretary Rumsfeld, we are indeed confused, but neither morally nor intellectually. However, sir, we are indeed confused. We are confused as to why we are at war, yet the Congress gives tax cuts. We are confused that we are at war with a country whose government is our (let us be kind here and not type puppet) ally. We are confused that it does not appear that we are at war — that is until we see the daily body count of our boys used as cannon fodder for BushCo, Inc., then we are too sadly reminded of “/mission accomplished.” Hell, we don’t even know what the mission is.

We do know evil when we see it, and it is you and your ilk. Your PNAC talking points are on target, the bullets fly and you sit in Salt Lake City playing McNamara. Frankly, we don’t care what Bill Kristol says about the war, nor do we give a whit for Chris Hitchens, that ginblown apologist for BushCo, Inc. What we do care about is the fact that the body count of Amercans continues to mount, and the Baghdad has become the most popular place in town for ad hoc get togethers for the families and friends of religious pilgrims, students, and bread buyers.

You can rant and rave, but it will not save the Republican Party from the coming political massacre.

Evidently the Ministry of Truth has declared, and the Inner Party seconded the notion that we “face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.” Evidently Ned Lamont is Chamberlain, al Qaeda is Hitler, Rupert Murdoch is Lord Beaverbrook and the CEO of BushCo, Inc is Churchill. We want peace and you give us war. You tossed out Saddam and gave us a pack of embezzling squabbling true “Bush League” players in return. You lament that the press only reports only the negative and neglects the positive: thank God for the Ministry of Truth (FoxNews), for without them, how would we know how great it is when the British papers, AFP, Reuters and Emannuela Goldstein (Amy Goodman) keep up the assault on AmeriCap?

Keep up your good fight, Mr. Church…je m’ajuste…Rumsfeld. Keep up the good fight for AmeriCap and BushCo, Inc. Your soldiers love you! The people love you, FoxNews at the Ministry of Truth tells us so.

WTF? BushCo, Inc.’s EPA to close regional EPA libraries!

Earlier last week, the Wicked Trio received an email from a professional colleague at the NIH libraries in Maryland about a proposal by the EPA admin to close a number of regional libraries, including the main one in DC… All we can ask is WTF?

Here is PEER’s take on the news: and here.

For Immediate Release: February 10, 2006
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

BUSH AXING LIBRARIES WHILE PUSHING FOR MORE RESEARCH — EPA Set to Close Library Network and Electronic Catalog

Washington, DC — Under President Bush’s proposed budget, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is slated to shut down its network of libraries that serve its own scientists as well as the public, according to internal agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In addition to the libraries, the agency will pull the plug on its electronic catalog which tracks tens of thousands of unique documents and research studies that are available nowhere else.

Under Bush’s plan, $2 million of a total agency library budget of $2.5 million will be lost, including the entire $500,000 budget for the EPA Headquarters library and its electronic catalog that makes it possible to search for documents through the entire EPA library network. These reductions are just a small portion of the $300 million in cuts the administration has proposed for EPA operations.

At the same time, President Bush is proposing to significantly increase EPA research funding for topics such as nanotechnology, air pollution and drinking water system security as part of his “American Competitive Initiative.”

“How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?” asked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is moving to implement the proposed cuts as soon as possible. “The President’s plan will not make us more competitive if we have to spend half our time re-inventing the wheel.”

Frankly, those in the know should have seen it coming down the proverbial path. Health Canada is doing the same thing in defunding at appropriate levels the various libraries that serve as a de facto national health library. One supposed that the Rt. Hon. Mr. Harper is assuming that the NIH libraries will take up the slack…

We have no idea what Mr. Bush is doing. Supposedly this will save $2 Million (US) out of a total $2.5 Million library budget. Frankly, this pittance is astonishing — one assumes that a single trip to the Brush Ranch or Kennebunkport costs at least that for a week of “deciding.”

Evidently this was a pure EPA decision, and it was done in order to court favor with the “faith based” environmental policy which BushCo, INC presently exercises, that is to say “I have faith that I shall still have breathable air and potable water for long enough for me to die of old age in bed.” In other words, a retake on “the public be damned” only add “the researchers working on public policy” along with “the public” and we have Neo-conservative policy at its worst.

We assume that reading the The Fountainhead again along with an appropriate Bible passage will function for researchers basic needs. What more could they possibly need?

Rick Santorum to Be Attacked by a Gorilla!

Screeching Rats received the most humorous and interesting email earlier this evening. I reproduce the text and links as well as the Pennsylvania Death Caged Match with the very junior Senator from Pennsylvania/Virginia. Yes, Grandpa Gorilla will challenge Little Ricky, hopefully minus his pet stillborn child, at the Middletown Grange Fair over Rick’s continued attempts at the Neocon wet dream: privatization of Social Security. The Wicked Trio, having recently had a rather disheartening run in with the SS system, dares not release the results of said run in to Screeching Rats’ faithful readers, not quite yet, anyhow…let your Wicked Threesome simmer down and the event shal be revealed in full.

Here is the email and the delicious flyer for the Death Match:

From :     Jeremy Funk, Americans United
Sent :     Wednesday, August 16, 2006 4:14 PM
To :     The Wicked Trio at Screeching Rats
Subject :     Gorilla-on-Senator Action!

Go to previous message    |    Go to next message    |    Delete    |    Inbox
Americans United For Change

Dear Wicked Trio,

Rick Santorum, meet Grandpa Gorilla.

Pennsylvania’s junior Senator thinks he can defend his seat by obscuring his die-hard support for the privatization of social security.  Right now he’s down in the polls and, desperate for votes, he’s hiding from his own record.

That’s where Grandpa comes in.  See, Rick is planning to stump at the Middletown Grange Fair in the next few days and there’s nothing like an enormous gorilla to draw the crowd’s attention to his determination to dismantle social security.

I’m forwarding a flyer to help you imagine the scene when he has to face the music and tell folks why he wants to scrap the most popular and successful public program in our country’s history.

I can’t wait to report back to you on what happens up there — and where Grandpa is headed next.

Please forward this flyer around to anyone in PA who needs to know about Rick’s pro-privatization stance — or who may just get a chuckle out of thinking about him speechless for once:

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/painvite

Thanks for being a part of our group, and stay tuned!

Jeremy

Jeremy Funk
Americans United for Change

This email was sent to: Wicked Trio

Paid for by Americans United for Change
1825 K Street NW, Suite 210
Washington, DC 20006

Americans United can accept contributions from individuals, corporations, labor unions, and other sources in unlimited amounts. Contributions or gifts to Americans United are not tax deductible. Americans United is organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Cal Thomas is Insane

There can be no other excuse for his recent column entitled “Purge by Taliban Democrats” in the Washigton Times last week and then nationally syndicated. He took the defeat of Senator Lieberman as a “loss for the entire country.” I beg to differ. His hyperbole aside, it was merely democracy in action within the registered party members of a single small state. Or was it?

Thomas seems to try to coin the meme that the anti-war, anti-DLC wings of the Party are “ultra-leftists such as George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry” which he then goes on to claim will lead those on the ultra-left [I wonder who they are, as the people on the left wing of the Democratic Party are about as radical as a spinster's bridge club in a provincial town] to ensured defeat as did the platforms of McGovern, Dukakis and Kerry. Thomas sees Lieberman’s defeat as a purge of the non-Jacobins. I say if it is anything, then it is a shift of a single policy on the adventure in the Middle East while Osama bin Ladin remains in his palace in Karachi or cave in Tora Bora or in Mekkah, or wherever he is. I see it as a rejection of the DLC, spoon-fed focus group oriented “but the polls say we need a war” crowd enablers of BushCo’s policies.

The DLC free traders, pro-war, pro-Patriot Act, “I’m more electable than you” crowd has had its triangulating heyday. Noone died and left them in charge of the Party. This is our party. It belongs to all Democrats…not one small big business bossed clique. This is also the party of Senator Dorgan, Senator Feingold and Representatives Waters, Conyers and Kucinich. This is also the party where a huge number of nominal Democrats will vote for Bernie Sanders for senator this year. It is also the party of the DLC and the Blue Dogs.

But I digress, let us return to Cal Thomas: in Thomas’ rant, he caled the defeat of Lieberman an example of the “kill[ing] of one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party’s kook fringe.” Rigid? Kook fringe? Hardly!

The meme of the importance of this election is getting tired. It needs retirement of a permanent nature. An upswing of progressive writing and voting is in force. It will soon become a juggernaut and those not on the bandwagon will need wait twenty years, after the disastrous neocon policies the DLC has enabled right themselves and a rehab of those elements can be undertaken. It is the natural political tide: left, right, left, hard right, center left, center right… ad nauseum. Of course those who are mere politicians and able to wear as many cloaks as required will survive. Charmeleons appear to be nearly as resiliant as cockroaches. “Hillary Clinton as the new Vicar of Bray,” if one will. But these are mere politicians, neither statesmen nor authentic representatives of the people, nor even especially brilliant, merely sharp at knowing when to change cloaks and convince us that the coat is not new — they had always really worn it, just not in public…and then change the topic rapidly.

But back to Thomas. He alleges that Lieberman has correctly seen that “the consequences of American failure in Iraq would be catastrophic.” Well, Messrs. Lieberman and Thomas, word to the wise: our policy has failed and the result has been catastrophic. But not catastrophic in the sense I feel they meant. It has been a catastrophe in that it has riled up the Turks, one of our strongest allies for the blank check that the US has handed the Kurds’ attempt to enlarge Kurdistan at Turkey’s expense. Now we see them riled in return at the puppet government in Baghdad and failure of Washington to rein in their extremists. So now Turkey is angry at the US and Iraq as well as Kurdistan…fantastic! Who wins here? Iran. Next, the British occupation in the south of Iraq are not able to handle the massive influx of Shiite refugees from the center and north of Iraq towards Basra and Iranian NGOs take up the slack of relief for the Shiite refugees. Who wins? Iran. Next, Baghdad has a Green Zone and who even knows how many skirmish lines dividing neighbors as Shiites battle Sunnis and the fake Iraqi army that Washington so disastrously disarmed and demobilized. Utter chaos. The numbers of fatalities are so staggering that they no longer are considered breaking new. If that is not civil war, then heaven preserve us if that should come. Who wins? Noone.
Only Iraqi Kurdistan has a semblance of normalcy, yet wardrums threaten in the distance. Most of the Christians have fled their traditional homes of Mosul and Baghdad for unknown parts… No reliable electricity in the country, no potable water, no sewage treatment, a morgue filled with a thousand dead from bullet fire. This is Iraq. And so far, Mr. Cal Thomas, if that does not qualify as a catastrophe, then I do not know what does. It looks as if Iran, if anyone, has won a war between the Baathists and the United States.

The current exposure of torture and mass killings at US hands do not even need be addressed here to cement the point that Cal Thomas is insane, and that Joe Lieberman’s defeat was the loudest warning bell heard by a politician in many a year.

This is the link for Thomas’ rant — WARNING NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART OR THE YOUNG! WASHINGTON TIMES.

Screeching Rats: a Quest for the Regaining of Reason

The title, Screeching Rats, comes from a comment I made this August of 2006 regarding the defeat of an ultraconservative candidate in a school board race in the state of Kansas. Not an important election, one might presume, but her tirade against the “liberals” in the Republican Party who shot her candidacy down was what prompted the remark: she was shrill and bitter, to which my reply was, “The rats always screech the loudest and most shrill as the sinking ship’s waters engulf them.”

That is my hope: for the neo-conservative, paleo-fundamentalist anti-Enlightenment antilabor movement will be sunk as deeply as the Titantic. That it will become a mere relic — a fossilized historical curiousity of which much is legend, but ultimately merely an obscure wreck.

This writer sees current U.S. administration as being held hostage to a small group of disparate individuals who have often-competing aims, yet have managed to form a grand coalition. These are the people who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand and Paul Wolfowitz; the people who think there is a reason for the United States to back stab its former ally Iraq in the back and try to foist a “democracy” upon the Iraqi people which is nothing more than a rewording of Mussolini’s fascism. These are the people who toss out phrases such as “terrorist enabler” to describe a candidate who opposes continuation of a military adventure in Iraq and claim that the bright sunny future is merely around the corner, when the Iraqi people suffer random sectarian violence that makes an Orange Day parade in Derry look like an eucumenical picnic in comparison. These are the people who want to restrict our most cherished liberties in order to keep us free. These are the people who want to make conservative fundamentalist Christianity our state religion in all but name and whose eschatology is truly frightening in its implication, the raputurists, the tribulationists, the Dominionists and the “World is six thousand years old” crowd.

Even more frightening, for their present power, per se, and not mere electoral power, are the neo-conservatives: the Trotskyites of conservatism, those for whom “Ayn Rand in one country” is not allowed, rather, permanent war in order to keep the barbarians at bay in order to form a single world of a permanent underclass of ill clothed, underfed and nonmedicated workers who are allowed no dissent under penalty of retribution, that is, the denial of their daily bread given in exchange for their long hours of labor with a permanent uberclass of corporation leaders in charge of them all. This is an Orwellian, Huxleyesque vision of the future with billions of epsilons and two minutes of daily hate for all.

While all these people are frightening in their goals, what distresses me the most is the direction the Democratic Party has turned towards becoming enablers of that lot. A party of Jackson and Jefferson become a party of Miller and Lieberman. A party in which its brightest leaders with some of the largest followings becomes a party of back benchers, silenced by the corporate media, save occasional snipes at Kucinich, Conyers, and Feingold. A party where HR Clinton has been “anointed” the leading candidate yet was hobnobbing with the minions of corporate media power and when a true alternative candidate for her Senate race is running, is unable to have his voice heard.

Our party is sick, but not terminal, unless the status quo continues. It is up to the people to read, and then analyze what they have read along with the votes that are cast and follow the debates. It often seems that the debate has little connection to the vote, as some are willing to say one thing then explain it away when voting the other, coerced by the monied powers of the corporate lobbies. It is a sad day when it takes a lone elderly man hobbling on two canes, hands trembling to denounce the destruction of the Constitution, while dozens of able-bodied men and women do not even grace his presence in the chamber. It is a sad day when claims of necessity and fear of the corporate funds drying up allow only a single senator to vote against the adventure in Iraq and the horrid Patriot Act. It is a sad day when the Senate cannot stop a thug from becoming a federal judge. It is a sad day when there has to be a blog dedicated to this topic.

But in fairness, it is always darkest and coldest before the dawn.