SERIOUSLY, WTF?!

We are fucked.

Posted by ryan on 23 Apr 2008 at 02:10 pm

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Yeah, yeah, yeah… “Real American Hero” bladiddy, bladiddy, blah…

You probably know that John McCain got captured in Vietnam and was tortured for 5 1/2 years and now he is one pissed off old coot, but did you also know that he is crazy, panders to racists and is prone to freakishly aggro mood swings? No, well the folks at MoveOn.org have compiled a “Hit Parade” of Ol’ Crotchety’s darker points…

Please to enjoy: 10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.

4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”

5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.

6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.

7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

Also, I am not sure if you know this but John McCain is old. Like really fucking old. Crypt Keeper old. Just saying…

Now you know! And knowing is half the battle!

*NOTE: for anyone concerned with sources, check out MoveOn.org for footnotes to this list.

Posted by ryan on 07 Apr 2008 at 03:49 pm

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The Washington Post ran George McGovern’s great op-ed on why Bush-Cheney should be impeached. Read it HERE.

Posted by ryan on 08 Jan 2008 at 12:44 am

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If you aren’t the pop culture obsessed TV/Web nerd that I am you might have missed this rant from a “fan” in response to people dogging on Britney Spears for her outfit and performance at the MTV Awards. Peep it now as it’s the necesarry set-up for the payoff in the next video. If you have already seen it then feel free to skip right to the next jam:

Magic, right? Anway now lay your eyes on this slice of gold from comedian Phillip Wilburn:

Ah, the confluence of retarded pop culture and deadly serious government warmongering. Only in the good old U.S. of fucking A!!!

Posted by ryan on 13 Sep 2007 at 03:08 pm

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In a move reminiscent of Kitty Pryde sending her consciousness back in time to warn the X-Men of impending doom in the classic “Days of Future Past” story arc, Dick Cheney apparently attempted to warn us (by sending his future brain back to his 1994 body) of what would happen if we invaded Iraq. Perhaps the Dick will be overcome with guilt somewhere around 2009 when he realizes that his actions as VP sent the country hurtling towards the brink of destruction and in a final attempt to make good on a life of evil, he will use experimental science (perhaps a future pacemaker) to send himself back in time to undo what he had done.

So now we are the assholes for not listening.

Or perhaps he is just a dangerously destructive and criminally out of touch old-timer determined to take the whole world out with him.

Either way…

Posted by ryan on 15 Aug 2007 at 12:16 pm

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Ah, the immortal words of Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson from the classic 80’s ode to balls out brute force “Aliens”…

Today a cloud has lifted from our world as Presidential string puller (and all around asshole) Karl Rove resigned to “spend more time with his family” (you would think they could come up with a better line after all these years).

Read about it from the BBC HERE, from CNN HERE and for the original story check out the new jewel in Rupert “Fox News” Murdoch’s crown of evil - The Wall Street Journal (note: I am not linking to the story. They don’t need our clicks).

And now for one of the less aggregiously evil (but representatively embarrassing on a national level) moments of Karl’s time in power…

Posted by ryan on 13 Aug 2007 at 01:20 pm

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The lovely Mrs. Lewis forwarded this brilliant essay to me today and I feel compelled to share…

BY HOWARD ZINN

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Posted by ryan on 03 Jul 2007 at 01:24 pm

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Just when I think Bush can’t do anything more to shock me he goes and spares “Scooter” from prison in the CIA leak case. For an administration that has been getting away with murder (and war mongering and war profiteering and constitutional dismantling and the list goes on…), the conviction of “Scooter” for his involvement in outing an undercover CIA agent was a rare case of just deserts. Sadly Bush’s knack for cronyism outweighed his “dedication” to justice, honor and integrity and he let Cheney’s right hand man walk despite the fact that a jury convicted him or perjury.

When are people going to realize that this administration has been getting away with crimes far worse than anything that happened in the Nixon administration? Wake up peeps, the madmen are running the asylum and you are too busy chasing Paris Hilton to bother getting angry.

Read the story from the BBC HERE and CNN HERE.

Worst president ever.

Posted by ryan on 02 Jul 2007 at 06:38 pm

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