oh, gah

Seriously fucked up metaphor alert:

from the comments on another blog in response to the capture of Abul Abbas (the man who hijacked the Achille Lauro and a Very Bad Man):

It's a War on Terror, not a War on Al-Qaeda... not that any of the far-left cares, of course. After all, it was wrong for Allied troops to bomb Germany when everybody should have known it was actually Japan that was behind the Pearl Harbor attack.

Of course, Germany did declare war on us, and it's more like we asked Germany if we could borrow their airbases to bomb Italy from, but damn, it's a right spiffy analogy other than that.

a different ack

We won the client's Best Company We Buy Stuff From award for last year, and they're buying us breakfast this morning.

I'm going to go put on a (shudder) respectable outfit now and practice my engaging grin.

Shudder.

heh! heh, I say!

Proving for roughly the 4,000th time that its vision of reality is more skewed and ill-minded and rather imbecilically overzealous than, say, Jenna Bush at a handgun expo, the wild-eyed and remotely well-intentioned but still dangerously twitchy kids over at PETA complained that Al-Jazeera is willing to run graphic footage of human war victims, but won't accept their commercial showing cows hanging upside down in a slaughterhouse after their throats had been slit, goats being killed and a chicken thrown violently at a box. Gosh. Mix the issue of human war horrors with issues of industrial food production. How clever. Hey I know, let's also run some pictures of crack babies, alcohol-related dismembering car accidents, botched plastic surgeries, rampant genital sores, and brutally graphic pictures of slaughtered Christmas trees left out in the street to turn all brown and sad. PETA said it offered to pay the network $10,000 to run its 30-second Arabic-dubbed spot, but was refused. Meanwhile, reasonably attuned people who still manage to maintain a modicum of perspective in this life ignored PETA's screechy extremism and donated money to their local SPCA instead.

and from the inimitable tbogg (I assume you dropped a hiatus form off with your supervisor, young man), this poignant missive from a fan of Ms. Lo and her gentleman friend (Lo and lower - been done?):

i did not sign this petition....i think who ever puts this much effort into something that will clearly go nowhere should get a life.....and on top of that....stop being such a hater....oh..and one more thing...think about it.....if youre so convinced that these people hold no talent...why do i know who they are yet ive never heared of you....
I, in fairness, have never heared of Mr. Boggioni either.


edit: I am informed in comments that "heared" is not the actual verb form which Mr. Boggioni's correspondent was searching for, which is ironic, under the circumstances, n'est-ce pas?

I wouldn't never have knowed that if'n you hasn't tolded me.

more stuff from around

from To the Barricades! (I love having an excuse to use two prepositions together), we show our commitment to Democracy in Iraq:

...So "freedom of speech," dear Iraqis, means you can say anything you like. But it doesn't mean anyone has to listen to you. It means we can't prevent you from saying what you like (but see above). But we can prevent anyone from hearing you.

You'll come to love this democracy thing. Really.


name of blog points out that General Garner is a bit of a jackass, and shares with us this redolent thought of the good general's about Vietnam:

..."It took too long," he said. "We should have taken the war north instead of waiting in the south. Just like here. If President Bush had been president, we would have won."

Truly. If he had been President he might have showed up for work. That always helps.


As for this rumination on the despoiling of the museums and libraries of Iraq (link may still be broken, so go to Late Night Thoughts and read The Death of the Word):

He who breaks [this book] or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishlar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog's mouth.

Um.

Gee, Miss Emma, ma'am, remind me not to piss you off, OK?

I mean that in a good way, of course.

You should scroll down and read the stuff about Cuba (where Emma was born) and cuban-american emigre culture. I think it's fascinating.

applying the paddles to the still grey chest of satire and shouting "clear"

Fred Phelps brings us Fred Rogers in Hell, via uggabugga

and so it goes... and so it goes... and so it goes...

dammit, digby, I was having a nice day.

...The lesson of Iraq for the US is that the United States had better be prepared to invade any country it “aggressively engages” from now on because it proved to leaders everywhere that capitulating to its “demands” guarantees them nothing. US power now rests entirely on forcen — it can no longer use diplomacy or any kind of positive reward for good behavior because the lesson of Iraq is that the US cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. Any threats short of war are useless because foreign leaders can no longer count on the US to keep its word not to invade if certain conditions have been met.

American foreign policy is now entirely unpredictable and is based upon nothing more than an elastic self-serving notion of American security. It requires no international consensus regardless of whether it directly impacts US national security and does not follow any international law or norms. It interprets treaties as it wishes without regard to precedent and holds other nations to standards to which it does not hold itself. It does not speak with one voice so its impossible to judge its real position and act accordingly. The American public are overwhelmingly supportive of America's new policy regardless of whether the government lies blatently about its reasons so there is little hope of any internal pressure to moderate. The world must now base its relationship with America on nothing more than blind hope or fear of one man's unknown intentions.

The lesson of Iraq is that the US is now the world’s most powerful rogue state.

and then my wife, Morgan Fairchild, had medical expenses...

Last year around this time, the authorities said, things seemed to be going pretty well for Benjamin Harris, a career office temp from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. His 2001 tax return had been processed speedily, and his refund check had been direct-deposited into his account at an HSBC bank branch in Manhattan.

But when Mr. Harris went to withdraw some of the money at an A.T.M., he was denied access. When he complained to the bank, he was advised to contact the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Harris dutifully complied, hoping to get the situation resolved. But there was a problem.

The problem, prosecutors said, was that on his return, Mr. Harris, 47, claimed that he was a lawyer for the Temporary Time Capital Corporation, had earned nearly $9 million, and was entitled to (and received) a refund of $1,580,065.

In fact, the authorities said, he did no work at all in 2001 for Temporary Time. The last time he had, in 2000, he had earned $1,061.

The Internal Revenue Service invited Mr. Harris to come down to their office on Broadway in Manhattan yesterday morning to discuss the matter...

ooh.

Toxic waste and carbon-based wastes into heating oil, fertilizer and clean water, via arisbe