How the Devil Works

They don’t call him “The Prince of Lies” for nothing. (And I note that no feminist group screams and insists that Satan might be a woman, you know, the Prince OR Princess of Lies. Hmmm.)

Not the Devil, just plays him on the Radio

What? you ask.

OK, it’s about Our Nigger President.

There. I’ve said it. Shocked you. And I apologize. Truly, humbly and sincerely. It’s a bad thing. But think about it: we have heard nothing BUT that said (by actions) from the Inauguration on, only in increasingly transparent code. And there is a difference between a bad word spoken with a good intention and good words spoken with bad intentions.

This Staggering Mass of Secret Info

Guest Blog by TOMM

Yesterday, WikiLeaks posted the Pentagon’s “Journolist” papers.  On Sunday, more than 90,000 Classified documents about all aspects of the Afghan war were put online by Wikileaks, and massive presentations were provided by the NYTimes, The Guardian in the UK, and Der Stern in Germany.

I mean, they do not just have A story or An editorial, they have each created a package of stories that seems pretty much unprecedented, though of course the Pentagon Papers come to mind. This material is far more extensive, and there is more to come. Since the LATimes has a page one story this morning saying that the White House condemns the leaks blah blah blah, obviously they are missing out, and likely other local papers, no matter how high their aspirations, are underplaying this extraordinary release of info. The Washington Post, for example, leads with the same angle as the LATimes:

U.S. condemns release of leaked documents

Their page one [online] sidebar is:

Wikileaks flexes some muscle

and, with a photo selection:

Ground-level account of Afghan war Documents provide new insights into a period in which the Taliban was gaining strength.

Pillars of the Earth: A Brief, Literary, Interlude

They premiered the miniseries “The Pillars of the Earth” on Starz last night, based on the eponymous Ken Follett novel. Something kept tickling me in the back of my brain saying, “Didn’t I review that book?” And, in my living room bookshelves are the hardcover AND the galleys that I reviewed.

Yeah. I guess I did.

Galleys, for those who don’t know, are a sort of preview softcover, usually with a Table of Contents all marked with zeros and paginated poorly at best, with a warning, THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED PROOF, admonishing the reviewer to check the final copy for accuracy of their quotes.

Good luck on that. Usually, the hardcover comes in long after the review has run, and generally, in my experience, editors KEEP the hardcover, which, in this case, I can thank Steve Paul at the Kansas City Star for not doing, and sending along the hardcover when it finally appeared.

So, from September 11, 1989, here’s my Kansas City Star review of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth (the book). We’ll get back to cranky right-wing sugar-daddies for infantile little bow-tie-boys tomorrow.

More Fake Cowboys

Welcome to post #888.

Tucker Carlson’s “The Daily Caller,” and their snide “purloined letter” campaign against the “Journolist”s reporters and against Keith Olbermann melded today.

As Ezra Klein, Journolist’s founder, told Howard Kurtz in yet another Washington Post gutless he said/she said column today [emphasis added]:

[Ezra] Klein says there is no evidence that [Journolist] members collectively carried out the strategies being debated: “What would be disturbing is if people came to a conclusion together, and you looked the next day and it appeared in everyone’s blog or everyone’s column.”

Carlson’s juvenile “getbacks” are MEANT to be witty and right-wingy hilarious and all business-sneer-at-the-peasantsy, until you start looking at who is actually FUNDING The Daily Caller…

We begin with an Authentic Wyoming Joke that I was taught as a wee lad in Laramie:

Q: Why is a hemorrhoid like a cowboy hat?

A: Because. sooner or later, every asshole gets one.

In Part 1 (“Tucker Carlson is Keith Olbermann; I am Glenn Beck,” 18 July) I talked about Carlson’s eerily infantile attack on Keith Olbermann. Today we talk about Carlson’s financial backer.

ii. More Fake Cowboys

Breitbat Skates on his Race-Baiting

First things first: The second part of my look into “The Daily Caller,” about Tucker Carlson’s shadowy backer, zillionaire and fake cowboy Foster Friess  is delayed, because I stumbled into such a nest of serpents that more research is needed before I can write about it intelligibly. In fact, part two becomes even MORE urgent in light of events since part one was posted.

The New Logo of the GOP

The Daily Caller launched their second salvo against “Journolist” writers yesterday, but were trumped in their latest salvo in the Right Wing’s War Against the Media (and against facts) by a classic of the genre: (yet another) Andrew Breitbat’s [sic] phonied-up video that got Shirley Sherrod fired from the USDA by Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former Democratic governor of Iowa.

Happy Moon Day!

Perhaps the finest moment in the life of our species. Forty-one years ago today, on a hot summer evening.

A species from this planet …

The Most Busted Name In News

I can’t help it: Told ya so.

The scam, Mark I

No: not the LA Times column on the quakes in the Salton Sink region. Nor about Afghanistan. Nor the Washington Post story on .. oh forget it. The problem with being consistently ahead of the curve, and consistently right* is that going back to document it begins to expand exponentially with success. If you’re a regular reader, I don’t have to remind you.

[* As Walter Brennan used to say in "The Guns Of Will Sonnett": No brag; just fact.]

No:

I’m talking about the Tea Parties and the fake, astroturf “Tea Party Express.” Mark Williams was “officially repudiated” by various Tea Partiers today and yesterday.

The scammer, Mark II

I’ve been pointing out that the whole Tea Party Express III was astroturf, based on my original outing of the selfsame group in 2005, first as an anti-Cindy Sheehan group, then repurposed as an anti-Obama group in 2008, and now as a cash-making publicity machine in a cross country bus, kicking off in Searchlight, Nevada. Listen to the “War Room of the Tea Party” today:

Tucker Carlson is Keith Olbermann; I am Glenn Beck

prologue: Phaeton Falling

OK: for the latter portion, you should see the eponymous posting, “I Am Glenn Beck” (6 Sept. 2009) But for the former, look no further than Politico.com and the pathetic loser that Tucker Carlson has become. (Which is the obvious segué from Glenn Beck.)

We were looking for an August Barking Moonbat. Were.

You might recall that Carlson was the new “bow tie daddy” of the KKKonservative movement, the new face on CNN’s venerable “Crossfire” before Jon Stewart blew the show out of the water by speaking truth to power. Then, hanging on at CNN for awhile, he was fired, picked up by MSNBC, who fired him again, and, fronting for some KKKonservative deep pockets has a new “Big Time” blog called “The Daily Caller,” although, in fairness, I suppose that ANYone can misspell “cellar” and if their spell checker finds a legitimate word, miss their own error.

If You’re Going to Pull a Hoax, LEARN about PhotoShop

I really haven’t paid much nevermind to the ongoing train wreck of the Mel Gibson kerfuffle, except to think that this is, no matter how it turns out, a Hall of Fame performance in the “get back at your boyfriend” sweepstakes, easily outclassing the Kim Basinger leak of ex-hubby Alec Baldwin’s rant to his teenage daughter by Basinger.

See the original “World Exclusive” here

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

In less than three weeks we managed to be as far West as Seward, Alaska, as far North as Willow, Alaska, and as far South as just inside the Mexican border at El Centro, California. Some of it I drew.

Uh oh!

There’s more. In no particular order:

The Lunatic Mindset of the Minnesota GOP

Felons Voting Illegally May Have Put Franken Over the Top in Minnesota, Study Finds screams the headline. And you KNOW it’s got to be from Faux Nooz™, “Unhinged and Bigoted.” Er, I mean “Fair and Balanced.”

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman. The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes — fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

How art thou batshit crazy? Let me count the ways. Let’s assume that the figures are correct (which is an assumption that CANNOT be made with any intellectual rigor, given the endless string of false and KNOWINGLY false facts presented by the GOP/Faux/Goebbels triumvirate of anti-Reality mediums just in the past six months).