More Missteps for McCain; Huffington Post Remembers Russert With Censorship

Talk about too little too late. The feds conducted massive arrests on many of the scam artists that helped make the current mortgage crisis possible. I wonder how many of the Bush will pardon. In any event, this should have happened years ago, but the Chimperor's see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach prevented that from happening.

One enabler for the dire state of housing these days is Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has done a 180 and now wants new federal powers to regulate Wall Street. Another tacit rebuke of neocon-onomics.

Then there is this disturbing little freudian slip by GOP congressman Mark Kirk.

The Republicans are missing their fundraising targets by a big margin because of the dissatisfaction with McCain and Bush and now, unlike past campaigns, the Democrats will enjoy up to a 3-1 financial advantage in the general election. Sweet.

McCain backing off on drilling for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge won't make too may of his corporate masters happy, either. This guy flip flops more than Ratfucker Romney and that is saying something.

Certainly, he can now write California off. He had hoped to be able to appeal to enough independents in California to carve out a victory there, but his calling for coastal drilling has cashiered that. Florida undercover gay Governor Charlie Crist, who had also been against exploration off of his state's coast, is now for it, cynically referring to it as a states rights issue.

Huh? Florida has no rights in this decision other than to have its voters throw the presidential administration out of office that drills there. This may have cost McCain that state, too. Obama, according to most polls, is leading in all the swing states right now. Only the Rev. Moon-backed Rassmussen Poll has him losing one of those states.

Even Jeb Bush was against drilling in Fklorida waters.

Perhaps as a hail mary to get on the goodside of MSNBC, which is owned by nuclear plant contractor General Electric, McCain has called for building 45 nuclear plants. Or as I call them, 45 new delicious terrorist targets. And that is before you get to nuclear waste disposition issues and potential safety problems. They also aren't very economical. I'm all for building more power plants, especially gas fired ones, but you don't use uranium, whose radiation is poisonous for about 350,000 years, to boil water, which is what a nuke plant does.

McCain's cartoon turtle-like economic adviser, Phil Gramm, gets his main paycheck these days from Swiss bank UBS AG. This can't help McCain's electoral chances.

It also appears that the Republicans are going to try to demonize Michelle Obama during the campaign. Huffington Post writer Stephen Elliott responded by musing on Cindy McCain's drug problem.

However, that doesn't matter to the yellow elephants. They take their marching orders from another druggie, Rush Limbaugh. So Cindy is just par for the Republican course.

Speaking of Cindy McCain, there was another Huffpo piece on her giving John McCain free transportation on her private jet. I wrote a response that as much as I don't care for the old geezer, the fact remains that John is Cindy's spouse and that this doesn't have the same scent of public corruption that other free excursions provided by corporate lobbyists to elected officials have. The Huffpo moderators censored that and instead printed missives all condemning the McCains for this. Kind of intellectually dishonest, no?

The Huffpo folks also continue to churn out drooling tributes to the late Tim Russert. The readership of the site is becoming fed up with it. While moderators have let through occasional condemnations of the potato headed Sunday talker, they are currently heavily censoring anything that contains really strong attacks of either the ongoing eulogies or Russert himself. Again, media royalism at its worst.

Any minute now, I expect Arianna Huffington to issue a fawning piece talking about how tasty Russert's semen was when she gave him a hummer in a beltway bathroom. She wil call it the milk of human kindness and devotion, or some other such blather.

And again, what are these pundits going to do when a real giant, Mike Wallace, finally grabs some eternal rest? Demand they put his face on Mt. Rushmore? Have a monument erected to him in D.C.? The bloviating classes have really put themselves out on a ledge here to the point of parody.

CBS' Lara Logan, not exactly your Phd candidate, lamented the less than substantive coverage of the Iraq war. Give her a tardy and put her in detention. It is one thing to say that now, but she obviously didn't have the guts to do so two years ago. So she is still just another media coward trying to do a fast song and dance to redeem herself.

Is corrupt Alaska congressman Don Young a politician or a leader of a religious cult? Jesus Q. Christ!

Is this the British government's attempt to pull a Mossadegh coup-type action on Equatorial Guinea? Especially since Margaret Thatcher's son Mark is involved in this.

Is Europe finally getting a clue on illegal immigration? This was a MAJOR issue (along with the Iraq war) in Britian that helped sweep the Tories into power.

In the wake of the download frenzy for Firefox the other day comes news that someone has already found a security hole in it. It still beats the hell out of Internet Explorer, though.

A lot of people are confused about what global warming entails. Many think it means that they will wake up one day and it will be 150 degrees outside. What the actual ramifications are concern the creation of more severe weather episodes and the shifting of climatic zones.

There is already a rise in global sea levels due to eroding cie fields in Greenland and the poles, causing many so-called "barrier islands" along the east coast of the U.S. to now be submerged. Those islands had acted as a brake on hurricane intensity, but now that they aren't there you could see far more severe storm surges than in the past inundating cities such as Miami and even Washington D.C., where flood waters could be licking at the White House grounds at some point.

That is due to the fact that the Potomac empties out into a bay, which leads to a one foot increase in river level for each foot of higher tide in the ocean. Washington D.C. was once largely a big marsh and diseases such as malaria weren't unknown there.

In hot water himself right now is a teenager in tony Coto de Caza in Orange County, California who not only hacked into his school's computers to change his grades, but he also conducted break ins to plant malware on school computers. He faces up to 38 years in jail, though he will probably get less than a year. I would like to see him get a nickel (five years) because this is a bad kid and you can't allow this kind of behavior to pass without firm legal punishment.

Unfortunately, too many people seem willing to cut this asshole a break, some recommending as little as community service and even companies hiring him for his hacking skills. Yeah, that makes sense for someone accused of identity theft, burglary, etc. Had this kid been, say, 25, the sympathy would have been non-existent. That's ridiculous. Fuck this retard.

He'll probably be hired as a Republican operative, though. He has the background for it. Amoral slimebag who has some dough.

Or how about some fucked retards? I mean, WTF?

Now where did we put those nuclear weapons parts? Oops, I can't remember! Now just why did you guys vote for Bush on national security issues?

I'm glad that Boeing is getting another shot at supplying tankers to the U.S. Air Force over Airbus, but Americans, unfortunately, both benefit and get hurt in that deal.

South Korea and Japan enjoy internet connection speeds far in excess of what you can get through ur monopolistic cable and telecom firms in the U.S. Well, that may change, but it is kinda late in the game and the Koreans and Japanese pay cheaper rates despite strong currencies.

And is Japan poised to blow Detroit up with its new hydrogen fuel cell cars? We'll see.

Also, here is an interesting way to think about car mileage.

If you're enough of an idiot to use HGH to boost your athletic performance, well, swing and a miss if this report is correct.

As I type this, I am watching an absolutely stellar series on the History Channel on the battle of Thermoplaye. You know, they one they made the move 300 about. If they repeat it, don't miss it. Just terrific.

Random Stuff

It's Firefox Day! Get her downloaded!

The Iowa disaster has been going on for days and Bush is going to wait until Thursday to survey the scene? What in God's name is he doing right now that prevents him from showing up at this economic, human and environmental disaster? Just more callousness from the Bush junta.

And now Mississippi may have massive flooding problems of its own. Fortunately for the GOP, it appears that its policy of infrastructural neglect wasn't the cause here, just a one in 500 years weather event.

Meanwhile, Bush cronies KBR still raping the treasury and they even got a government official who tried to stave some of this theft off fired.

And even as KBR is hindering our effort in Iraq, the Taliban appears poised for an offensive on the outskirts of Kandahar. Now what was it Laura Bush, who is looking so empty eyed these days she might as well be following a nutty religious cult, saif that things were going oh so peachy in a region we should have taken care of first before even considering any action elsewhere. But that makes too much sense and Turbo has none.

I don't know why I have to do this, but it bears reminding you that with all the talk of a possible strike against Iran, that also comes complete with Russians because the Putin regime has extensive dealings with the Persians and Russia has traditionally considered Iran within its sphere of influence. But you will hear nothing about that in the mainstream media because they are too busy being Bush"s pissboys.

Government corruption got a big thumbs up from an appeals court when a former Republican official's conviction in the Jack Abramoff case was set aside on a technicality. Where is the GOP outrage over this judge subverting a jury's decision? *lol

It's deja vu! Stagflation during a Republican administration!

On the other side of the aisle, a former Democratic state legislator and church pastor was convicted of fraud. I thought that being explosed to the good book was supposed to make people refrain from stuff like this. I am shocked *lol.

Then you had a case of cronyism in Baltimore, where mayor Sheila Dixon, an African-American Obama supporter, btw, is being investigated by the feds for possible illegal use of city money. So corruption just isn't for Republicans anymore.

You gotta love Texas. Or not.

The business media cracks me up sometimes. In this piece, they slam CNN host Lou Dobbs for "scaremongering" on the salmonella tomato issue after he raked Bush and his FDA over the coals for helping to make it possible. However, even though this outfit complains about what Dobbs said, they stop short of propounding that his statements were untrue. Plus this tends to back Dobbs up.

Nice try guys.

Media Royalism and Censorship at the Huffington Post

It isn't just NBC going totally overboard over the sudden death of Dick Cheney's favorite dupe Tim Russert. The Huffington Post has been riddled with tributes to the fan of Turbo Bush and it is now censoring comments excoriating Mr. Potato Head for his role in helping the White House propagandize the public into the disastrous war in Iraq.

I have personally had at least half a dozen posts reacting to HP contributors' effusive praise of Timmeh refused even though those comments weren't profane, off topic or ad hominem attacks on other posters. Indeed, somebody there apparently has it in for me since I have had other comments censored, too. None of those violated any of the HP's posting guidelines.

There was a particularly inane column about Russert scribbled by Jamie Frevele about how 'Sundays wouldn't be the same without [him]." So I retorted that Frevele had pulled a Pee Wee Herman and declared Russert "The King of Sunday!" I facetiously added that since his death cast such a pall over that day that no broadcasting be permitted to take place as a tribute to this media god.

In that connection, in talking back at a writer of another Russert brown nose article, I asked him, "so what are you guys going to say when Mike Wallace dies? Wallace actually made you feel good about the media because he was its junkyard dog that nobody wanted to cross, grilling his quarry to the wall until they admitted something they were attempting to conceal."

"On the other hand, Russert was a teddy bear, a soft, inoffensive, lightweight toy nobody minded having around. If you are going to treat Russert as some mythic figure, then how do you eulogize Wallace? As God? Russert didn't even deserve to breathe on Wallace's microphone."

Yeah, I can see how you would think of this complaint as whining, but the fact is that the moderators let through other more inane posts such as, and I quote, "do yo know how horny scotch makes you?" That one appeared TWICE.

In one instance, I questioned a writer's piece on his recent trip to Disneyland, pondering whether this was some kind of product placement. Disney is notorious for its unnecessarily relentless and sometimes underhanded promotion of its properties and there just wasn't any journalistic reason for the guy to pen this article nor for HP to run it other than maybe HP was being paid off to do so by Bush cocksucker Robert Iger's outfit. They printed three comments that were all just "we love Disney" type blather.

So the Huffington Post is both serving corporate masters and its own elitist circle of media acquaintances and friends and not necessarily its readership. In doing so, it is taking the condescending tack that characterizes the mainstream media's attitude toward regular folks. That is just wrong.

Conservative Correctness Rears Its Ugly Head in Calling Iraq a Civil War

Has anyone been scratching their heads over why the media has been so tentative about labeling the Iraq conflict a civil war? They shouldn't and there is a lesson in it.

The media is so full of cowards now that even stating what should be obvious to an eight year old is fraught with fears that the mighty rightwing Wurlitzer will bury them in an avalanche of criticism. So many of these media companies are seeded with Republicans in their executive ranks that reporters and headline writers are running scared that their necks are on the chopping block if the conservative echo chamber reverberates with the sound of grumbling.

Shit, look at Joe Thugborough accusing Danny DeVito of engaging in, and I quote, "political hate speech." First, it was on The View, who nobody above a room temperature I.Q. gives a tinker's cuss about. Thugborough also had some paint fall off of his macho facade by admitting that he cares about anything emanating from that yenta-fest.

Keep that in mind then you read today's headline about how a rightwinger is making a serious bid to buy the NY Times.

Republicans believe, much how the black community does, that it should be entitled to immunity from scrutiny from non-members of the populace by virtue of who they are because they each fraudulently claim that they have been victims of unfair portrayals in the media.

The actual truth is that in inner city America as well as in corporate boardrooms, criminality tends to be coddled and even, in certain circles, thought of as cool and they scream like stuck pigs when the police and prosecutors show up to interdict that and the media appears to capture it for its viewers, listeners and subscribers.

The media has, in fact, been way too timid in forthrightly dealing with both groups because they don't want to be accused of being racists on the one hand and being liberal stooges on the other.

Consequently, the time is more ripe than ever for the emergence of an American Hitler or Mussolini because the watchdog that is supposed to help prevent that from happening is either bought off by the problem party (NBC by GE, Sinclair, Disney, Fox, Clear Channel, etc) or have been scared into toeing the line (CBS, which is owned by Viacom). CNN is such a bore that it is hard to take seriously and it, too, has begun listing rightward.

So idiots like David Gregory, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, John Gibson and Brit Hume aren't just cowards, they, in a very real way, end up being collaborators and should be reviled as such.

By the way, Thugborough, Barbara Walters is a horse's ass. She's about as venerable as a can of sardines.