A Little Brighter

The sun shines brighter today, with the indictment of Tom DeLay.

Don't-hurt-me-crats: Here's your slogan for the next two elections:

Incompetent and Corruptible or Competent and Incorruptible?
Your choice, America.

Cold Comfort

From the AP:

Bush: Government Well-Prepared for Rita

By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer

September 24,2005 | COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- President Bush, projecting a take-charge role on Hurricane Rita, toured the high-tech hub of federal response efforts and said Saturday he was pleased by the government's preparations.

Since President Bush is congenitally incapable of taking charge of anything more complex than a bottle of beer (witness his past trouble with the accompanying pretzels) he offers something almost as good: a projection of a taking-charge role.

Nearly six hours after Rita made landfall, Bush tracked the hurricane's assault on the Texas-Louisiana border from the situation room at the U.S. Northern Command headquarters in the Rocky Mountain foothills, more than 1,000 miles away.

God forbid Dear Leader's feet should get moist with anything but flop sweat or the dampness of quivering fear.

Surrounded by plasma screens and slide projections, Bush got a detailed briefing on the federal plan to deal with the possibility of heavy flooding in eastern Texas and western Louisiana, additional spills from levees in and around New Orleans, and disruptions to U.S. energy supplies.

Which did so much good as Katrina approached during the Royal August Retreat. Brief a coldhearted moron all you like. He isn't going to get any smarter or kinder.

"We're in good shape," Navy Capt. Brad Johanson, director of Northern Command's joint operations center, told Bush after outlining the military personnel and equipment hurrying in to help.

"All it took was losing a major American city to abject incompetence to prod us from our stupor and remember that we're supposed to protect the United States, not just a few neighborhoods of Baghdad."

Following the hourlong briefing, the president said: "It comforts me knowing that our federal government is well-organized and well-prepared to deal with Rita."

"Because it's all about me."

Bush planned stops later Saturday in Austin, Texas, to visit the state's emergency operations center, and in San Antonio,

and knock back a few cold ones

where many federal supplies and personnel were being staged. His schedule was not immediately disclosed.

But is certain to include stops on devastated streets whose power will be returned for the duration of the Royal Peregrination.

The scurrying to set up photo opportunities for the president showed the White House in crisis-management mode.

Political crisis mode, of course, there being no other sort of crisis worthy of attention.

With his approval ratings lower than ever, Bush has suffered from the perception

Reality.

that both he and his administration responded too slowly to Hurricane Katrina. That storm devastated the Mississippi coast and southeastern Louisiana nearly a month ago.
Bush waited until two days after Katrina to cut short his vacation and return to Washington from his Texas ranch.

As he awaited the ripening of the political crisis.

The public saw images of thousands of people in horrible shelter conditions in New Orleans waiting for food, water, medicine and rescue. The administration was blamed by many for not doing more sooner.

"many" "all but 26 right wing morons", whatever.

Bush's aides were eager to avoid a repeat with Rita and try to restore the public's trust in government. But they also were aware of the risk of criticism if Bush's large entourage got in the way of storm response.

'Cause that never happens.

So they settled on Northern Command as the best place for the president in the first hours after Rita struck. The command was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to direct the military's homeland security activities.

Bush arrived Friday evening for one briefing, then woke early Saturday and had a second.

Don't strain yourself, Mr. "President".

Bush stayed far from Washington,

where thousands of people would like to see him driven through the streets coated in tar and feathers

where opponents of the Iraq war held what they hoped would turn out to be the largest such rally in the capital since the war began. The protest was spurred in part by Cindy Sheehan, the California woman whose son was killed in Iraq last year and who drew thousands of demonstrators to her 26-day vigil outside Bush's Texas ranch in August.

Bush's presence in a briefing room hundreds of miles from the White House and the storm recalled the surreal quality of Tuesday's update on Rita aboard USS Iwo Jima. Then, he flew from Washington to the ship, docked in New Orleans, to be briefed on Rita's approach via videoconference by two officials back in Washington.

The president also devoted his weekly radio address on Saturday to hurricane response, as he has now for weeks, and detailed the government's efforts.

Even as the focus turns to Rita, Bush pledged not to forget the massive job of recovering from Katrina.

"We'll do our duty," he said, while urging local and state governments, the private sector and ordinary people to do so, too.

How about doing your fucking job, idiot?

At Northern Command, Bush pleaded with the millions of people who evacuated ahead of Ritay to obey local authorities' instructions before deciding to return back home.

"It's going to take awhile for the authorities on the ground to fully understand the impact of the flooding. People who are safe now ought to remain in safe conditions," Bush said.

"So I'll know where to find them to finish the job."

Snarkfest concluded. We now return you to your collapsing nation.

Let Free Markets Prevail!

As long as you don't mind a few "special" Chinese ingredients in your beauty products:

The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners

· Cosmetics firm targets UK market ·
Lack of regulation puts users at risk

Ian Cobain and Adam Luck
Tuesday September 13, 2005
The Guardian

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.
Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is "traditional" and nothing to "make such a big fuss about".

Why fuss about anything, after all?

Checklist

Courtesy of Digby:

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

(Source: The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry)

Enough?

For four years now I've been saying it to everyone who wouldn't listen:

THE REPUBLICANS CAN"T PROTECT YOU. They're too stupid, venal, and obsessed with making the wealthiest 1% of Americans not just richer, but unfathomably richer beyond the dreams of Croesus to bother with pesky details like, say, PREPARING FOR A MAJOR DISASTER IN AN AMERICAN CITY.

The only difference between the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and a signifcant terrorist attack (dirty bomb, biological bomb, tactical nuclear weapon) is that the idiots running this sorry excuse for a federal government had AN ENTIRE WEEK TO PREPARE.

AND THEY STILL FUCKED IT UP.

And I'm being kind, since in January 2001, FEMA warned of three likely American disasters in the near future. Care to guess?

1) Terrorist attack in New York City.
2) Category 4+ hurricane devastating New Orleans
3) A major San Francisco earthquake.

Maybe Bush and his gang of contemptible bottom-feeders will get lucky and hit the trifecta.

Is this enough yet America? Your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world in the service of evil men who hold this country hostage to their insatiable appetite for wealth and power, grinding up the bones of your fellow citizens to make their bread and bleeding those citizens white so their close personal friends will not suffer a moment's inconvenient thought that there might be other people on the planet. Your sons are dying, purposeless, in Iraq, instead of helping at home, here, where they're really needed. You say the left is undermining the morale of the troops? How is a National Guardsman from New Orleans supposed to concentrate on his job if he's wondering whether his grandmother back home is that dead woman in a wheelchair outside the New Orleans convention center?

These evil, sick, twisted, stupid, abominably stupid men and women must be removed from power and locked away before they cause the deaths of thousands more people around the world and here at home. President Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and every member of this incompetent, criminal administration must be impeached and removed from office for their gross stupidity and bottomless venality.

They're not protecting you. They're exploiting you. Do you understand yet, America?

Enough. Enough. Enough.