It Went Like This...

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this

The buildings toppled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful..
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

Dead Flag Blues (Intro), Godspeed You Black Emperor

Idee Fixe

Why?



Sweet jesus, why can't I stop thinking about you? Two years should be enough. I've done my time, haven't I? I changed everything, everything about my life that was part of our life. And still, that fucking splinter drives inward, festering all the while.



Every time I think it's all right, something new happens. This latest setback reminded me of that Pollyanna moment I had about a year ago. I think I was pretty close to losing it for a while. Like when I was a kid all over again. Everything inside goes hollow, stomach feels like I have a ball of cold lead in it. That almost-but-not-quite-choking sensation.



I'm really looking forward to you living further away. I want you out of my head.



Out_of_My Mind, Duran Duran (incredibly slow download)

Patriotboy on Mitt

I absolutely love (in purely Christian, heterosexual way) Gen. JC Christian, Patriot

This, Mitt believes... (Volume 1)



The kerfuffle over Andrew Sullivan's post on Mitt Romney's magical underwear inspired me to do a weekly series of posts on Mitt's Mormon beliefs. As the great great grandson of a Mormon prophet, Willford Woodruff, a holder of the Aaronic Priesthood, and an LDS Seminary Bowl champion, I think I'm more than qualified to do so.



We'll start out with Kolob. It's the star nearest to the planet where God lives. It's important to remember that. We Mormons get very angry when gentiles say we believe God lives on Kolob. It makes us sound crazy. God couldn't live on Kolob. He isn't a sun person; he'd burn his feet.

Go read the rest here. Make sure you check out his commentary on sacred underwear, as well as Sullivan's original post.

Some tunes

Enjoy.

Summersong, The Decemberists

Yankee Bayonet, The Decemberists

I Turn My Camera On, Spoon

Into The Ocean, Blue October

Cannot Sleep Better Not Eat, The Prayers Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers

We Will Become Silhouettes, The Shins (Postal Service Cover)

Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now), The Postal Service (Phil Collins Cover)

Many blessings.

I don't even know what to say.

Below the fold, I'm posting an extremely upsetting video.  A UCLA student was repeatedly tasered in the Powell library, and someone recorded the encounter.  The police can be heard threatening students who have asked for the arresting officer(s) badge number(s).  The subject was refusing to move, and rather than simply handcuffing and removing him, they tasered him, handcuffed, and then repeatedly tasered him again, and again, and again.

I'm sick to my stomach over this.

I called UCPD, and they pretty much told me to fuck off.  They wouldn't even tell me who I could contact, at the school,  that had supervisory power over them.  I was simply told to call back on Monday.  No one would even discuss the matter until then.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I will.  Here's their number: 310-825-1491.
In case that doesn't work, the main switchboard at UCLA is 310-825-4321.

Again, this video is disturbing. The student being arrested is screaming in pain, the officers are shouting at him, the other students are visibly scared and angry.

Don't forget Poland!

From Spiegel, via Jabberwonk, h/t jenise

My Half-Year of Hell With Christian Fundamentalists

When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul. Here's his story.

*snip*

"When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, 'Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.' At that moment I just wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.

Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because -- so they told me -- they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart.

*snip*

Then, seeing as we were already on the topic of God's will, the religious zealots finally brought up a subject which had clearly been on their minds for a long time: They wanted me to help them set up a Fundamentalist Baptist church in my home country of Poland. It was God's will, they said. They tried to slip the topic casually into conversation, but it really shocked me -- I realized that was the only reason they had welcomed me into their family. They had already started construction work in Krakow -- I was to help them with translations and with spreading their faith via the media.

Change

Has anyone considered the make up of the incoming Senate yet?

Sanders and Feingold, backed up by people like Leahy and Kerry  .

I grew up under Reagan and Bush 41.  As far back as I can remember, the Repubs controlled nearly everything.  The Gingrich Revolution is the first clear moment I have of congressional politics.

And I'm coming to the realization that things have changed in a fundamental way, one which I have no basis for comparison.

Above and beyond fixing Junior's fuck-ups, there's a pretty good chance that some progressive ideas will finally get a fair shot.  Health care.  Living wage.  Proper oversight and regulation of corporate America.  I really can't even fathom it.

Instead of debating whether waterboarding is torture, or if habeas corpus is outdated, maybe we can look at things like climate change and fair trade.

I'm daring to hope for the first time I can remember.  And it feels good.

A note to the crew from Rapid

A quick note from the Rude One

And South Dakota Discovers Its Citizens Are Sane:
Looks like the good citizens of South Dakota decided that the crazy law banning virtually every abortion was bullshit, voting it away. Power to the people. Eat shit, fundies.

Exactly.

Let's see if we can finish turning back this talibangelical tide.

Way to go, Dubya.

A brief follow up to Wil's post about the Iraq WMD Website Disaster, brought to you by DarkSyde, over at Kos.

Now I realize that an alleged scandal involving a gay hooker, a Right-wing evangelical leader, and crystal meth is enough to make the Rita Cosby's of the broadcast news world tremble with excitement. But I thought a story about how our illustrious War President and Defender against Terrorism over rode his own weapons security experts at the behest of the Rubber-stamp Republican Congress and posted highly classified, detailed technical tips for making a fission bomb on the Internet might be worth a mention.

Here's a summary of some of what is being reported:

• In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, facing the embarrassment of no WMDs found, the White House found themselves in possesion of thousands of pages of Iraqi documents pertaining to obsolete WMD programs from before the first Gulf War
• To provide fodder for out of context quoting and neocon fear monergering, to save time and money on translating, and to retain a few votes, the Republican Congress with the cooperation of President Bush wanted to post the raw docs on the Internet and invite right-wing bloggers and web surfers to pitch in and read through it all to find any quotable gems.
• John Negroponte, bless his black little heart, had enough brains to oppose this incredibly asinine idea knowing full well that the data had not been read and vetted.
• Apparently, Bush the Decider, a guy who wouldn't know a neutron from a noble gas, reportedly decided to over ride expert advice and do it anyway.
• Buried in the stacks of dull inventories and mundane trivial minutia were the plans for how to fabricate and assemble the critical components of a working fission bomb.

On top of everything else some of it was published in Arabic and available for several months, thus giving the bad guys plenty of time and saving Al Qaeda the bother of having to translate it. I can only imagine that Islamic terrorists and sympathizers the world over fell off their camels peeing in hysterical laughter. Which would make a convenient segue for bowing to Mecca and praising Allah for answering their prayers with George Nukular Bozo Bush backed up by the Republican Big Shoe Atomic Clowns. Speaking of the latter, I can't wait to watch the warm-up GOP Solid Gold Pundit Dancers uniformly step-ball-chain from the Mushroom Cloud Stomp-n-Fear number right into the "accidentally posting the plans for a nuke in Arabic on the Web is no big deal" Tap Dance & Election Finale without missing a beat.

"I hear the voices... but I'm the decider."


Technorati Tags: Bush, Iraq, WMD, Treason, Negroponte, Nukular

Let me count the ways...

So, the Rude One has another post up that I really enjoyed.

Why Vote Against Republicans? Because Fuck Them:
America, the good ol' USA, is a country that was brought into existence by groups of terrorists and insurgents aided by foreign powers. Its first rallying document was the Declaration of Independence, a list of reasons why King George III and the British sucked balls. However, no matter what that hand-scrawled Declaration told the colonists, a good many people living in Massachusetts or Maryland could've bottom-lined it for you: "Why revolt against the British? Because fuck them, that's why."

*snip*

Now, even through the deadening fog of Fox "News" rhetoric, multiple jobs, dying pensions, depleting health care, the waterboard effect of credit card debt, force-feedings of fatty foods, soul-killing reality TV, the entire cultural apparatus telling us we must want more and more stuff and shit, the dead-ends of public debate, government-instilled paranoia, dementia masking itself as religious faith, the unsubtle shove towards xenophobic isolation, an antagonistic corporate media, the vicious street-beating death of American intellectual thought, and Bush-worship masked as patriotism, through it all, man, all of it, we have come to this magnificent moment, frightening and exhilarating in its implications, where we, as a majority, are looking at the ruin and waste that surrounds us, piles of shit that we are told are mountains of gold, and we can finally, in this savage season of 2006, at long last come to say, "You know what? Fuck them."

How do I loathe thee?

Fuck them for trying to make us believe that America's acts of mass destruction, its bumblings into conflagration and apocalypse, in Iraq are actually just speed bumps, commas, if you will, on the road to a peaceful world of democratic nations bowing down to blow the cock of American hegemony.

Fuck them for holding themselves up as arbiters of morality and when they were confronted with a simple moral equation, they cast their lot with savages and genocidal maniacs. No, not the embryonic stem cell research vote, you backwards ass anti-science fundamentalist fucks. On torture and judicial rights, where even those who proclaimed themselves defenders of the detained and imprisoned ended up dancing like slut marionettes on a puppet pole in the Oval Office when it came down to actually, say, defending the detained and imprisoned.

Fuck them for making Americans fucking hated around the world, as if we're all ex-Nazis or, maybe more accurately, members of Pinochet's Chilean army back in the day, squandering the real triumph of America as a beacon of rights and fairness. However unreal that image was, it's better than being "that big ass country that tortures innocent people."

Fuck them for leaving New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to die, as if somehow those parts of the country were gangrenous toes that could just be cut off.

Fuck them for telling us we're too stupid or traitorous to understand what it is they're doing in trying to re-make the earth in their image, for keeping secrets in the name of their own security while literally and figuratively selling out ours.

Fuck them for lying to us about so goddamn much, about science, about their own policies, about what they actually, really were recorded saying, about what's genuinely important, like the out of control debt and the melting planet, instead trying to get us to think that, if a couple of guys wanna get married or if some pop singer's tit jumps out of her blouse, Godjeebus will smash the earth with his mighty Bible-club of divine justice.

Fuck them for...well, you know what? Just fuck them.

Go read the whole thing here.



Technorati Tags: Rude Pundit, GOP, Republicans, Iraq, President Bush