Southern Culture On The Skids

“Voodoo Cadillac”

Giuliani Hits Bottom

Giuliani Spotted Sleeping On New York City Subway

June 20, 2008

Giuliani, once a beloved New York figure who earned the nickname “America’s Mayor,” was wearing a faded New York Yankees jacket and a dirty FDNY cap pulled down over his eyes.

“Everyone was sitting on the opposite side of the train because there was a real bad smell coming from his side,” said passenger Melissa Humber, who witnessed Giuliani lying across three seats and using a rolled-up New York Post as a pillow. “He seemed to jolt awake when a homeless guy started ranting about 9/11, but then he just sighed and went back to sleep.” Giuliani was last spotted shaving in a New York Public Library bathroom.

B’Man: The Onion is the funniest site. Their new movie is available (released June 3) and it is funny. Check out the link and blog. Hilarious.

Maybe Rudy should join this church:

Non-Controversial Church Opens For Potential Presidential Candidates

While not paying attention–

There are too many things that I want to comment on, that happened while I was busy prepping for surgery on my leg.

 THE LIE: China is drilling in Cuban waters off the Florida coast….

THE TRUTH: China is not drilling off the Cuban coast, but they do have Cuban permits to explore there. They ARE however drilling in Colorado.

THE LIE: Environmentalists are preventing oil companies from getting permits for new drilling THE TRUTH: Over 6,000 new permits have been issued by our government to drill in the last few years alone, in fact the oil companies have so many permits it would be impossible for them to drill at them all.

THE LIE: Offshore drilling and drilling an ANWR will lower the price of gas. THE TRUTH: No one knows how much oil is in ANWR, it may be enough to last a year, but estimates are no more than 10 years. There is wide speculation that it is also very poor quality crude. The cost of drilling there and the refining is now cost effective, it will only lower the price of gas at the pump by 1 – 2 pennies a gallon. Also on offshore drilling, they have permits they are not being stopped from drilling.

THE LIE: Offshore drilling is so safe that even Katrina and Rita did not cause an oil spill. THE TRUTH: The oil spill in the gulf was so large it could be seen in satellite imagery from outer space.

THE LIE: McCain and Bush are spouting how the VA bill is there idea and how pleased they are that it passed THE TRUTH: Do I really need to spell this one out….Uhm, Didn’t Bush threaten to veto it? McCain called it unnecessary..

The LIE: Britt Hume from where else Faux news channel made statements that Obama’s brother says Obama is a Muslim. THE TRUTH: What his brother really said: “Because I am a Muslim myself, and I don’t think that my being a Muslim has got anything to do with my brother being the president of the United States.”

THE LIE: The price of oil is due to a shortage THE TRUTH: The rise in oil prices are mostly the fault of speculators. There is no shortage, as a matter of fact there are container ships filled with oil and no buyers for it. Iran has a few sitting off their coast. Our very own reserves are at peak levels. The farm bill passed with a veto proof majority, Bush has threatened to veto it. In the farm Bill is legislation to close the what is being termed the “ENRON loophole” It is not a loop hole, it was legislation inserted by none other than Phil Gramm in the dead of the night, just before the bill was to be voted on, thus eliminating any debate over it. Clinton signed it. Enron was already doing some price fixing before that legislation, this just made what they were doing legal. The rolling blackouts in CA were ENRONS doing to drive the price up for energy commodities. This legislation is also the cause of out of control gas prices. It allows the speculators to drive up the price of oil. It is estimated that 60% of the increase in gas prices are due to this reason. The mortgage crisis is the exact same scenario. With many of the same players. Bears Stearns traders and upper management have been arrested, more arrests are to follow in the future. Same scenario as ENRON lying to investors, fraud, insider trading. Expect the same result. The leader will suffer a heart attack before sentencing, making it impossible for any of his assets to be seized in order to pay back the investors. I believe he walked out with 450 million in a severance package, plus he dumped quite a bit of his personal stock before they crashed.

Scotty Has Sumpin’ To Say

Are You Part of the 17%? If So, You Are a Dumbass

Amanda at ThinkProgress links us with the latest poll results:

Eight in 10 Americans say country is headed in the ‘wrong direction.’

A new AP-Ipsos poll finds that nearly eight in 10 Americans believe “the country is moving in the wrong direction…amid soaring food and gas prices, falling home values and unending war. Just 17 percent say the country is going in the right direction.” This figure is the lowest since the survey began in 2003, and when compared with other past surveys, “the general level of pessimism is the worst in almost 30 years.”

Your Tax Dollar: Better Used for Iraq or Health care?

B’Man: Our illustriously Bush suck-up leadership in Congress is spending your money again. They are taking your hard earned dollars, stealing the “taxed” portion, then spending that money on Iraq and the Military Industrial Complex’s insatiable need for more and MORE.

I wonder if you rednecks could think of a better way to spend our money than on an illegal invasion that you were lied to to accept and endorse? How about health care?

If someone were to ask you how to spend the money you give the government, would you select Iraq as the beneficiary? Would you select any freaking country or military base that wasn’t in America?

Neither would I.

Norman Solomon has an excellent article in which he suggests that our piss-poor health care system, totally dependent upon and financed through profit-driven motives, is a better investment than Iraq. If you disagree, could you take the time to explain why?

Fund Health Care, Not War

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet.

Speaking in a time of war, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Somehow this madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, young soldiers are returning to the United States from terrifying zones of carnage. The old claims of a justified war have melted away. So have the promises of a humane society back home.

Statistics about the war dead tell us very little about human realities. And familiar downbeat numbers about health care — 47 million Americans with no health insurance, perhaps an equal number woefully under-insured — tell us very little about the actual consequences or other options.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known,” Yes! Magazine noted in the autumn of 2006. “There’s little argument that the system is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the health-care system is just as broken.”

That’s an apt description. For all the media focus and political rhetoric on health care, the mainline discourse is stuck in a corporate-friendly rut. But there are signs that a movement for a rational, humanistic health-care system in this country is now gaining strength.

A few hours after writing these words, I’ll be at a large demonstration in San Francisco. The lightning rod for this historic June 19 protest is a national meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an outfit that cheerily pitches itself as “a national trade association representing nearly 1,300 member companies providing health benefits to more than 200 million Americans.”

As it happens, this meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans got underway just as news broke that the congressional “leadership” has devised a formula to fully fund more war. “Democratic and GOP leaders in the House announced agreement Wednesday on a long-overdue war funding bill they said President Bush would be willing to sign,” the Associated Press reported. The bill would “provide about $165 billion to the Pentagon to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for about a year.”

There’s a lot of profit in death. Under the guise of national security. And under the guise of health care.

Today, across the United States, people are dying because they don’t have access to health care. But policy solutions are available. In Congress, about 90 co-sponsors are backing H.R. 676, a bill to provide “comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents.” Call it whatever you like — “single payer” or “improved Medicare for all” or “universal health care with choice of providers and no financial barriers.” What it adds up to is the policy option of treating health care as the human right that it is.

In the latest edition of “Health Care Meltdown,” author C. Rocky White identifies himself as “a conservative Republican who has always held an entrepreneurial ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ free-market philosophy.” A longtime physician, White describes “the frustration I began to experience while trying to provide compassionate, quality health care in the context of a market in which the accustomed rules of business economics don’t apply.”

Dr. White immersed himself in research on health-care policy and finance. Then he pored through reams of the latest data on the tradeoffs of reform options. “No matter how I turned the cube,” he writes, “the answer never changed. That answer was nearly impossible for me, a free-market Republican, to accept.”

Here are Dr. White’s two key conclusions in his own words:

• “Until we remove the motive of profit from the financing of health care, we cannot and we will not resolve our current health care crisis.”
• “Any group that proposes reform policy that maintains the use of for-profit insurance companies in a so-called free market is being driven by one single motive — to protect the golden coffers of their share of the $2 trillion cash cow!”

Dr. White adds: “To continue down this road is paramount to suggesting that we privatize our fire and police services and turn them into for-profit organizations. You do that and people will die — just like they are dying now under our current health-care system!”

Grotesquely, the insurance and hospital industries at the center of health care in the United States are, in effect, profiting from priorities that condemn many people to death and many more to avoidable suffering.

Meanwhile, corporate enterprises continue to make a killing from U.S. military expenditures now in the vicinity of $2 billion per day.

During a wartime speech in 1969, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald said: “Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.”

The preoccupation continues.

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,” Martin Luther King observed, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Still, somehow, this madness must cease.

Freaky Sex Friday: When She’s Wore Out, It’s Time To Pull Out

Tim Russert: Where’s The Beef?

B’Man: OK, folks, don’t get angry because I’m going to talk about a dead guy.

I was never a fan of Tim’s. I was never a fan of Meet The Press or any of the NBC political team’s coverage of politics over the last 10 years, especially regarding the MSM’s (and Tim’s) complicity in allowing Iraq to happen without even much of a peep.

MSNBC went a long way to open up to progressives when they hired Keith, but it is evident that they were carrying the Idiot-in-Chief’s lying message all the way up through the illegal invasion of Iraq (and it appears they will say little in regards to the “Iranian threat”) which just so happens to mimic the non-existent Iraqi threat a few years ago.

But it is clear that Russert and all the other talking NBC heads were eagerly regurgitating each and every lie and intentional misleading diversion with hungry, master-satisfying abandon. I hold them just as much accountable for what America was duped into, as I do the actual criminal neocon reTHUGlicans who did this.

I have been hesitant to say much about Tim, because I do not want to attack the man… just the lie that was his on-air persona. Sure, he could ravage a guy over an issue that, in comparison to the lies of Iraq, was meaningless. But, this guy who has been dubbed royalty by NBC punditry, did NOTHING to ask the right questions leading up to this clusterfuck.

I thought that his mediating of the Presidential Debates was atrocious, to put it mildly.

This article below was presented at AlterNet (originally at The Nation):

Tim Russert Blew It on Iraq. So Why Are We Canonizing Him?

By Alexander Cockburn, The Nation

The delirium in the press at Tim Russert’s passing has been strange. As a broadcaster he was not much better than average, which is saying very little. He could be a sharp questioner, but not when it really counted and when courage was required. He was tough with George Bush in a February 2004 interview. He taxed him with faking the reasons to attack Iraq. But in the years before the 2003 attack, I used to hear Russert being merciless to those questioning whether Saddam Hussein had the nukes and bioweapons alleged by the Bush Administration and its co-conspirators in the press, prominent among them Russert himself.

Russert and his staff ignored efforts by watchdogs like Sam Husseini and others to get him to stop telling lies to the effect that it was Saddam who threw out the UNSCOM weapons inspectors, whereas it was Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM, who pulled out the inspectors, apparently at the instigation of the United States. As Husseini correctly writes, “This lie, echoed through much of the political-media system around the time Russert told it, helped set the stage for the invasion after 9/11.”

If Russert had rocked the boat in any serious way he’d have had more enemies. The right-wingers didn’t care for Walter Cronkite, but they had no problem with Russert. Rush Limbaugh nuzzled him respectfully on the air, and so did Don Imus. Russert was always there with his watering can to fertilize myths useful to the system. On Russert’s memorial show Ronald Reagan glowed in memory, up there with FDR as the twentieth century’s best-loved and most popular American President. Not true at all, as Russert — trained to read polls by years of working for Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan — could have found out in five minutes if he’d wanted to. Reagan had a scrawny 52 percent average approval rating for his presidency, worse than JFK, LBJ, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Johnson. His supposed “likability” was also hugely exaggerated. But the invention of RR as the toast of the ordinary folk was necessary to validate the disgusting pigout for the very rich he inaugurated, which continues to this day.

Similarly necessary has been the notion that if it means winning the “war on terror,” ordinary Americans are OK with the President (along with the US Congress) making a bonfire of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Russert helped spread that lie too, even though polls dissected in numerous accounts by press watchdogs like FAIR have shown that a narrow majority of Americans hold contrary views on the matter.

Russert spent many years working for Moynihan, who played the greasiest cards in the political deck, whoring for the Israel lobby, race-baiting for Nixon. Few were more zealous than Russert in shredding anyone with the temerity to criticize Israel. Obama, now shuffling Moynihan’s greasy deck with his Father’s Day sermon about black responsibility, got a dose of Russert’s own race-baiting earlier this year, with a ridiculous volley of questions about Farrakhan and Wright in the February 26 debate. Any white telly pundit can make hay with Farrakhan, but when it came to high gasoline prices Russert was meek as a shoeshine boy on his show, lining up the oil execs and tugging his forelock.

After Russert’s death the TV played over and over the clip of his interview with Dick Cheney, where the latter said US troops will be greeted as liberators. Russert didn’t say, “What do you mean, Mr. VP? People historically despise occupying armies. Bombing historically does not win people to your side.” It was a softball moment for Cheney. Russert was part of the amen chorus.

Now, after his death, in congratulating Russert, his eulogists in the press get to congratulate themselves. On Hardball, Chris Matthews decided to have a show much like the one he always has, stacked with Irish Catholic men. This time it was more self-conscious, but the self-consciousness of it only underscored the incredible skewed reality that the show presents day in and day out.

Matthews began with a prayer. “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. [Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.]” Then he introduced guys who are on his show all the time, Mike Barnicle and Pat Buchanan. And the three of them had a kind of Irish wake on the air, laughing, remembering, talking about the importance of parochial school and the values imbued in Tim and all of them by the nuns. On and on they went, about Catholicism and the Irish, and the special quality of Irish Catholics as “truth tellers,” as people who “get the bad guys” — prosecutors, G-men and journalists. Russert was put right up there in the pantheon of FBI agents, without irony, people who delve for the truth, for the light, for the greater good against the “bad guys.” Matthews used that phrase, “bad guys,” over and over. Then he closed the segment with the other half of the prayer: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

Russert, they said, was the guy who always did it better. So it was as if the closing prayer put Tim right there by the side of Mary, an interlocutor to God for the lesser lights, the Chrises and Pats and Mikes, the “sinners” who only strive to be like him.

The TV carried live shots of Russert lying in state, and the mourners could pass by and merely touch the edge of his coffin for a cure, or hope for a cure. This after seven years of craven, culpable journalism across the mainstream board. No one at this point is remembering the reporters at Knight Ridder, who were among the few in the mainstream pre-war to hammer away at the WMD argument. Russert’s colleague-survivors need him as a saint.

B’Man: Amen and amen.

The Bush Administration Are War Criminals: Says Gen. Taguba

B’Man: I been saying it for quite a long time, but it sure feels good when one of “them” comes out and says it.

From Matt at ThinkProgress:

In the preface to a report by Physicians for Human Rights on the “medical evidence of torture by the U.S.,” former Abu Ghraib investigator ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba writes that President Bush “authorized a systematic regime of torture” that has stained “our national honor.” Taguba, who first spoke out publicly in June 2007, bluntly accuses the Bush administration of committing war crimes:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The report found that medical examinations of 11 former detainees revealed “scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy.”