Edgy comic George Carlin dies at 71

Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin was amazing. His routines were those of a 2%er who managed to actually connect with the rest of the world. From religion to sex to politics to culture to plain reason, he was a veritable cornucopia of wit and humor.

In sum, I have this to say: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

Some favorite quotes.

Religion convinced the world that there’s an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there’s 10 things he doesn’t want you to do or else you’ll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! …And he needs money! He’s all powerful, but he can’t handle money!

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Update: he got better as he got older. To a point. Just don’t read the later books.

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While trying to figure out how I could monetize my “$100 million and climbing” HSX brilliance, I found Intrade. Holy cow is this awesome. Actual money on politics and news events. Of course, given my recent successful predictions (and GOP shenanigans), this is could just be an even easier way to lose money than Lotto.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the things you can trade in (I don’t know precisely what will come up; it’s a dynamically generated frame):

And their banner advertisement looks something like this:

Yet another thing that’s probably more Chartoo’s forte than mine, but I’m kind of excited about day trading in the presidential aspirations of Saint Rudy. I know. I need to get out more.

The biggest problem I had so far was actually getting money into the system - their security is quite a bit more comprehensive than the one-click universe we’ve been inhabiting. This is good in that I’m pretty confident any phishers aren’t going to be going there to take your money, but it can also be a drawback if you spot a sweet market opportunity for the avian flu’s arrival date in the U.S.

If you click the banner ad above, theoretically I get $50 if you both put some money in and do a bunch of trading over the next 90 days. If you just want to go to intrade.com and skip the lurve-giving to me part, I’m totally OK with that. I’ll just give you the puppy dog eyes and maybe sigh a little bit.

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Zombie Cheney pushes graft to his company KBR.

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that the Department of the Army, per order of U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, has released to Judicial Watch approximately 100 pages of documents which detail the multi-billion dollar, no-bid contract awarded in 2003 by the Army to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. One document uncovered by Judicial Watch suggests the United States Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) may have publicly lied regarding the involvement of the Vice President’s office in awarding the contract.

In an email dated April 22, 2003, Carol Sanders of the USACE, writes, “Mr. Robert Andersen, Chief Counsel, USACE, participated in a 60 Minutes interview today in New York regarding the sole source award of the oil response contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root….Mr. Andersen…was able to make many of the points we had planned.” Sanders subsequently provided sound bites from the interview, including, “There was no contact whatsoever (with the VP office).”

This directly contradicts another email uncovered by Judicial Watch in 2004. The email, dated March 5, 2003, sent by an official of the Army Corps of Engineers whose name was redacted, stated, “We anticipate no issue [with the KBR deal] since the action has been coordinated w VP’s office.”

Read the emails. They’re just patently awful, and a sign of just how corrupt this government is. Using soldiers to cover for the asses of the powers behind the throne, who are lining their pockets with corrupt no-bid contracts given to incompetent contractors. This is the kind of government behavior you typically only see in despotisms or autocracies. Rarely does this pervasive, blatant corruption exist for any period of time in a democracy.

Hmm… I wonder what kind of government we have?

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The idiot son is also an asshole. From today’s press conference:

Bush: You gonna ask your question with shades on?
Wallsten: Yes…
Bush: But there’s no sun out here.
Wallsten: It depends on your perspective.
Bush: Touché.

The key bit of information here is that Wallsten is blind.

There’s no way Bush should not have known that, Wallsten’s been around for a while. He’s just defaulting back to his towel-snapping assholery in the form of jokes. What a dick.

Update now that I have cable, I saw the Daily Show cover this in depth yesterday. It was awesome.

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No frogmarch for Rove

The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove.

The key question the reporters have to ask the suddenly laconic Luskin is, “is there a sentence saying ‘provided Rove continues to cooperate’ in the letter?” As disappointed as I am that Rove isn’t going to spend a long time in an orange jumpsuit, I think it’s obvious that this is only true because he turned and said whatever he needed to say to keep his evilness out of jail.

Which means a frogmarch for Cheney is still a possibility.

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The death of Zarqawi, while not a time for celebration, is certainly in the camp of Good Things. We must remember, however, that he was but a prop used by the Bush administration to increase domestic fear, distract the public (Osama!) from the real bad guys they couldn’t get, a justification for their own failures, and as a straw man for their delusions. I haven’t blogged on Zarqawi’s death because there’s not much to say; he was a criminal figurehead, had few ties with al Qaeda, was not all that powerful in Iraq, did not work well with others, and was no good in the field. He’s a bit player puffed up by the Bushies to be a big thing.

Unlike, you know, Osama bin Laden.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m with Billmon on this one:

the news that a committee of scholarly bootlickers has blackballed Juan Cole’s candidacy for a tenured professorship at Yale absolutely refuses to leave me in peace.

This may not seem like particularly noxious news, at least when compared to the stench of putrefying corpses hanging over Haditha, or the Nazi stab-in-the-back myths now being recycled in Right Blogistan, but it’s touched an extremely raw nerve with me - because of what it says about the age of fear and intellectual intimidation that we live in, because of the unadulterated vileness of the self-appointed commissars involved, and, not least, because I consider Juan Cole my friend, and a man who won’t take the time to speak up for a friend who’s being blacklisted is, as the Godfather might put it, less than a man.

Now, I don’t know Juan Cole. He and I aren’t friends, and he probably doesn’t need any defense from me. What I do know is that he is a fair-minded intellectual history professor who is an expert on the Middle East, fluent in the languages of the region. And english. Which is nice, since I don’t know those other languages.

In addition to his other pursuits, Professor Cole maintains a blog, focusing on the news out of Iraq and the region at large, gathered in large part from the news sources of the region and translated by Cole. Because he’s fair-minded, because he speaks the truth about things like Zarqawi and Ahmadinejad and the actual situation on the ground and Israel’s policies and how it affects Palestinians, he has been relentlessly attacked by the mouthbreathing pond scum of the right wing bigotsphere. It’s his view that Palestinians are people too, and whose rights are being infringed, that has brought the thermonuclear righty meltdown (see also, the uproar over the papers about AIPAC’s influence, etc.)

Cole doesn’t need our defense in any substantive way; he’s ably smote all of the fools who challenged him on factual or interpretive grounds (particularly Goldberg, a repeat ass kickee). Cole could probably use some moral and publicly-stated support, however, because you see, the vile, dishonest, cowardly, Stalinist cretins of the right have finally found a way they could hurt him: by working money angles to keep him from getting tenure at Yale. And it worked.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Krugman’s got an article on the latest push to further establish a new gilded age. A fuedal society where only the Waltons and Hiltons and Rockefellers have the means and the rest of us plebes work for the benefit of those worthless sacks of flesh.

The Senate almost voted to repeal the estate tax last fall, but Republican leaders postponed the vote after Hurricane Katrina. It’s easy to see why: the public might have made the connection between scenes of Americans abandoned in the Superdome and scenes of well-heeled senators voting huge tax breaks for their even wealthier campaign contributors.

But memories of Katrina have faded, and they’re about to try again. The Senate will probably vote this week. So it’s important to realize that there’s still a clear connection between tax breaks for the rich and failure to help Americans in need.

Any senator who votes to repeal the estate tax, or votes for a “compromise” that goes most of the way toward repeal, is in effect saying that increasing the wealth of people who are already in line to inherit millions or tens of millions is more important than taking care of fellow citizens who need a helping hand.
…
Who would benefit from this largess? The estate tax is overwhelmingly a tax on the very, very wealthy; only about one estate in 200 pays any tax at all. The campaign for estate tax repeal has largely been financed by just 18 powerful business dynasties, including the family that owns Wal-Mart.

Once again, the procedural vote will be the important one. If the vote for cloture succeeds then the bill will surely pass at an estimated cost to we, the People, of hundreds of millions of dollars. All for the benefit of herpes-infested nothings and antisemitic goons and messianic, prudish, sanctimoniously evil poverty profiteers.

This pandering to the base by the GOP is almost as sickening as the blatantly transparent bullshit W (et.al.) is spouting about supporting a Hate Amendment to the Constitution (side note: seriously, how mouth breathingly stupid are the bigots who vote GOP? Every 2 years, they pull out the same bigoted, nativist, mouthfrothing hate agenda as if they’re going to do something about it, and every 2 years these undead zombies pull the lever. And yet… nothing is ever done. Along with being hateful and inhuman, they’re all dumber than a bag of rocks.)

There are more than a couple senators and ‘08 wannabe preznits who will vote for cloture and then against the bill on the full Senate floor. This is what Biden and Lieberman (among others) did on the execrable bankruptcy bill, and what Cantwell and Lieberman (among others) did on the scAlito nomination. This is what McCain will do. I’m sure Lieberman will right there with him.

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Short answer: looks like it.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong.

This echoes my thoughts almost precisely. The bookies, too, were betting on Kerry. The bookies!

I’m generally loathe to join in conspiracy theories, but I think it a likely truth that the last two national elections were stolen from we, the People. The scale of the corruption and antidemocratic evil is just so astounding that is almost incomprehinsible, and to quote Han Solo, “I can imagine a lot.” It may not be centrally directed (who needs to centrally direct when you’ve got willing, fanatical authoritarian participants in positions of power in every county? You read the bulletpoint memo and let them loose), but the corrupt effort is widespread, and on the state level pervasive, particularly as to intimidation and disenfranchisement via bureaucratic moves or lies (adding up to more than vote count fraud, though I have no studies to back me up as the subject is impossible to study).

However, as there’s no clenis involved and the fascists GOP holds all the reins of power, there will never be an investigation, nor will anyone be held accountable. Except the powerless and the small whose backs are going to be first against the wall, that is. The media hand-waves it all away without really looking at the issue. After all, what’s in it for them?

Kennedy’s article is the most important so far on our disenfranchisement, not necessarily due to the depth, but due to the publication it appears in - Rolling Stone. This is the widest reading yet and as close to mainstream as this will probably ever become. Hell, I may have covered this a couple times before (here and here), but Jane and Joe Schmoe have probably never even considered the issue.

Once the sheeple wake up and realize we’re living under the autocratic thumb of authoritarian cultists with no democratic legitimacy, well… I’m sure they’ll flip the channel right back to American Idol.

But a couple might not.

Update: Manjoo raises substantive issues with RFKjr’s article. RFKjr has been reliable in the past, but it is possible he overreached and possibly been dishonest. I’m looking forward to the reply.

Update 2: RFK responds. I find Manjoo’s overall points uncompelling and his rebuttal of the RFK response particularly weak. I think what we can all agree on is that something about the results from Ohio 2004 stinks like a frat house bathroom the night after a party. The particulars may not be precise, but we know something was up, as all the results went wildly in favor of the GOP beyond all reason or expectation, and the situation needs to be examined and fixed.

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The Congressional Black Caucus is making a huge mistake in supporting Jefferson here.

Furious black lawmakers, rallying behind Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), were pulled back from the brink of open revolt against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in an emergency meeting with her Wednesday evening.

Jefferson is on tape taking and putting into his car’s trunk $90,000 worth of money that was serial number matched to the bills found in his freezer. He’s corrupt and he’s stupid and he needs to resign for the good of the party.

The CBC putting the interests of one of the members of their subset ahead of interests of the Democratic party - and let’s not forget the country - is really fucking stupid. On the political side, it will add legitimacy to the false equivalency bipartisan bullshit that the media will try to use in re: the Republican culture of corruption. DeLay took $400 million, Jefferson $90,000… but it’s not going to matter to the media with their “but the Democrats are corrupt too!” messaging. It is also bad for the party nationally as it reinforces the belief that all politicians are corrupt and the false image that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

I’m not saying that the FBI sweep on his office was legitimate - it’s not, both on Unitary Executive bullshit grounds (even Hoover never thought he could raid a Congresscritter’s office) and it’s also almost certainly partisan and racially motivated (DeLay and Cunningham’s offices were never ransacked) - but supporting him on this small battle loses the war.

Jefferson is corrupt. Jefferson is harming the country and the party. He needs to go.

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With very few exceptions, I second Greenwald’s comments today - the Dems are a shameful collection of wallflowers and submissives. The impetus for the latest offense is the Hayden nomination.

Yet again, Senate Democrats show that they have no more concern for the rule of law and for the excesses of this administration than Senate Republicans do. Due to their really pitiful passivity, they are every bit as much to blame for the excesses and abuses of the administration as the compliant Republicans are.

Even acknowledging their minority status, they have done a pathetic job as a minority party; acting more like sycophants or the fawning courtiers of the media than an actual legislative body.

Outside of Feingold, they’ve rolled over on every important decision in the past 6 years and they deserve all of the scorn you can give them. Bankruptcy, Iraq, the Supreme Court, wiretapping, Iraq, Guantanimo and Abu Ghraib, Iraq, confirmation hearings, Iraq. The sole win for them in the past half decade was Social Security. That’s it. GOP - 3 million, Dems -1.

Pathetic and shameful. When the history of the downfall of the United States into a theocratic despotism is written (written after the downfall of the despotism, of course… or by furriners), the complicity and credulity of the media and the complacency and cowardice of the one and only opposition party will take up many chapters.

Vichy. Quisling. 21st century Democratic party.

The only thing saving these sad sacks is that we don’t have a parliamentary system. That’s it. I don’t think “we’re not as bad as those assholes” makes for a good campaign slogan or a solid foundation of support, though. Do you?

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The dude is not only refusing to eliminate a run as an independent, but he’s also going to take his ball and go home.

After initially agreeing, Senator Lieberman has declined our invitation to participate in the MoveOn.org Political Action online primary for U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

The phrase ‘whiny little bitch’ comes to mind. In a completely gender-neutral sort of way, of course.

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Lamont’s amazing performance is pretty much the death knell for Lieberman as anything other than a Republican or an “independent.” That Lamont got 33% of the party establishment vote is nothing short of incredible.

I think 33 percent is a pretty bad number for an incumbent senator to give up to a challenger nobody ever heard of. Certainly, the Lamont team members were staggering around like dazed lottery winners. “Pinch me,” Lamont campaign manager Tom Swan told a comrade. The Lieberman team was acting like they knew it all along. “Can we count or can we count?” Lieberman manager Sean Smith languidly told a reporter. He was unpersuasive. It may have been a number that tumbled out of their worst-case game theory, but it certainly was not a number they wanted.

The real number is lot worse for Lieberman than 33 percent. I don’t know how big the Lamont vote would get if you could tabulate the no-shows and the sleeper cells of delegates who plan to vote differently in the primary, but I do know it’s a bigger number. And the convention is full of party regulars, usually the easiest people to keep in line. Wisdom of the ages would suggest that the “amateur” voters are potentially much more rebellious.

Congrats to Lamont. He still has a primary to win, but with these numbers, it is highly likely that Lieberman is toast. Goodbye, Joe, you sanctimonious, sexist, prick. You will not be missed.

For those that don’t remember that Joe was the first person (not just Democrat) on the Senate floor to call for impeachment, for those that don’t remember Lieberman’s constant attempts to stifle free speech, for those that don’t remember Joe’s vote for cloture on the heinous bankruptcy bill, for those that don’t remember Joe’s vote for cloture with regards to scAlito, how about his support for rapists’ rights?

Lieberman said he believes hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for “principled reasons” shouldn’t be forced to do so. “In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital,” he said.

Again, congratulations to the Lamont team. Keep on truckin’!

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There are only 3 states with positive approval ratings for duhbya right now. Billmon calls them ‘Rump States’. I call them dead enders.

President Bush . . . has a positive job approval in just three of the 50 United States. This according to 50 separate but concurrent statewide public opinion polls conducted by SurveyUSA for its media clients across the country. Only residents of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho view the president favorably.

I’m amazed there are enough morons still around in any state to give him a majority approval anymore. You know, after the massive die-off from eating the bad batch of Goldstein paste.

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Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Update: looks like Jason Leopold is not the most trustworthy of sources, so grains of salt. As it has now been two full business days in the week since this report came out, let’s just say it’s veracity is in doubt. For my part, I think it highly likely that Rove will be indicted in the near future. There are very few other possible explanations for Fitzgerald’s actions.

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