Thom Hartmann | Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists

Thom is right, right, right. And I mean that in the nicest liberal way possible. Punish the corporations that hire cheap, illegal labor enough that they have to raise wages to a decent standard.

Thom Hartmann | Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists

Pants Aflame in the White House

Yes, there was debate about the intended use of those high-strength aluminum tubes. Yes, Bush was aware of the debate and spoke the infamous 16 words in his 2003 SOTU anyway.

Murray Waas has the best-documented narrative to date on the cherry-picked intelligence. And, even though CIA Director Tenet fell on his sword over the 16 words, the president knew he was "disassembling" to the nation as he gave his address.

Waas also details the damage control and the cover up of this fact, including the retribution against Ambassador Joe Wilson. Yes, Virginia, Rove leaked Plame's identity to Robert Novak, although why they thought outing Valerie Plame would discredit Wilson I'll never understand. Maybe I'm not the sexist pig I thought I was.

Will the rest of the media see this story as new news worthy of reporting? If so, we're in for some fun times watching the White House Bucket Brigade put out all these fires, as well as a lot of logic-twisting excuses from Limbaugh, Fox News and the rest of the GOP Media Machine.

Before then, however, read the story:

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Insulating Bush (03/30/2006)

Not the same McCain.

While campaigning for the 2000 presidential nomination, McCain stood up to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. I'd say it was one of his endearing qualities.

No more. McCain wants the fundamentalists to work for him in '08, it seems, unless there's another reason for speaking at Falwell's Liberty University. Onward Christian Aviator.

Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments

Good, good news. Our belated Christmas gifts are on their way:

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Read the whole article at truthout.org. And stop smiling, if you can.

Fun with XHTML tables

Yeah, they're tables. Yeah, they're cheesy. Worse, you put them in the hands of an amateur and you get ... Velveeta. Not even genuine cheese, you know. But I had fun anyway. Please remember: it's a joke.

Homework Blockage I

In Nada Surf's The Weight Is a Gift I taste a lot of favorite flavors: Tommy-era Keith Moon drums, sweet vocals and Byrdsian harmonies, and mature, reflective lyrics. Powerpop for the middleaged? Maybe. I especially relate to "Always Love," whatever that says about my thinking these days:

To make a mountain of your life
Is just a choice
But I never learned enough
To listen to the voice that told me
Always love... Hate will get you every time
Always love... Don’t wait til the finish line

Slow demands come 'round
Squeeze the air and keep the rest out
It helps to write it down
Even if you then cross it out

But Always Love... Hate will get you every time
Always Love... don't wait til the finish line

Self-directed lives
I want to know what it’d be like to
Aim so high above
Any card that has been dealt you...

Always Love... Hate will get you every time
Always Love... Hate will get you...

I've been held back by something
Yeah. You said to me quietly on the stairs,
I've been held back by something
Yeah. You said to me quietly on the stairs.
You said...
Hey, you good ones.
Hey, you good ones.

To make a mountain of your life
Is just a choice
But I never learned enough
To listen to the voice that told me...
Always love... hate will get you every time
Always love... hate will get you...

I've been held back by something
Yeah, You said to me quietly on the stairs,
I've been held back by something
Yeah, You said to me quietly on the stairs
You said...
Hey, you good ones
Hey, you good ones
Hey, you good ones
I...

I love the mystery and the imagery of "I've been held back by something/Yeah, you said to me quietly on the stairs," the meaningful whisper that he doesn't yet grasp and the cinematic shot downward as they try to find their way upstairs, perhaps on a fire escape, at an overcrowded party. Then, I'm stuck trying to find the portent in "Hey, you good ones...." Maybe it doesn't matter what I think; maybe what matters is that the speaker finds the words powerful enough to hold him back. And maybe the speaker is "held back" because he's thinking "wtf?" Nah. Probably not.

Then there's the line beginning with "self-directed lives" that speaks to me.

I can't get back to coding homework without saying how much I love Matthew Caws' vocals.

(This much.)

New Music and Demon Copy Protection

I've been on the bleeding edge of new music for what seems like an eternity. For my birthday, Julie and the Boys™ gave me the new ones from Nada Surf, Franz Ferdinand and Guster. Not so new, but really good nonetheless. A couple weeks ago I picked up Arctic Monkeys. Haven't digested much more than the single.

I tried to import Nada Surf and Franz Ferdinand into iTunes on my G4 workMac. FF didn't make a sound; NS sounded like a record with a realllllly light tone arm as it skims only the top of the grooves. Then both of them worked fine in my PIII laptop and iTunes. I guess it's a Mac problem with the copy protection. Anyone else have this problem?

Mark Morford | Three Years Of Happyfun War!

Three Years Of Happyfun War! / 1,100 days of brutal violence and death, grinding you down to a numb little nub. Thanks, Dubya!

I like Morford's hyperkinetic hyperbole, although I admit that it's not for everyone.

In this piece, I agree with everything but the assertion that we can't withdraw from Iraq without making the region more unstable. I believe that our military presence is the electric cattle prod making the region dance in the first place.

Still, the larger point is well-said: we are numb to the lies, the destruction and the incompetence that is part and parcel to the Iraq War. For many people, the war is little more than another source of white noise in our daily lives and, when we think about it at all, we shrug our collective shoulders, say we're stuck, and move on to consider some young, photogenic, and famous person whose life we think we comprehend a little better.

Happy anniversary.

Of Sea Spray and Dungarees

On another forum I was asked what I liked about the navy. My first response was that it was only six years of my life. (No disrespect meant to retired chiefs here, M.) I remember, when I was a squid, all the regrets told me by older ex-squids: "I shoulda stayed in. I coulda retired by now. Don't you make the same mistake, son."

I promised I wouldn't make the same mistake. I would remember why I couldn't wait to get out and how hard I laughed at reenlistment back in 1985.

It's not that I wanted to hold a grudge, really. Okay, a little. I just didn't want to have regrets about that particular road not taken. Nostalgia, our inner opiate, allows us to see only the good times glistening in amber. How could we have walked away from something so beautiful? So I wanted to remember the bullshit and the frustration and the stupidity and all the people who put the petty in Petty Officer.

We anchored just outside Auckland harbor which meant that at least one reactor plant would be operating to provide power and fresh water. I had a midnight watch and I wanted to go ashore for a little while, so I made an arrangement with Tim, the guy I was going to replace. If I'm late, I said, please cover for me. I wouldn't be long, but as we had high seas, the liberty boats might take a little longer to get me back. I would even take an extra shift for him so he could go ashore. He agreed.

I was only 20 minutes late for my watch but Tim was pissed. He thought he had had to wait too long. He retaliated by tattling to my chief. Chief K didn't really care about our agreement, saying it was my responsibility to be there. Period. So he took away a day of liberty and gave me four hours of Remedial Military Instruction for my crime. "Maybe you'll learn a lesson, Touchberry."

Sure. I couldn't trust that asshole Tim.

The next day I was on the main deck with another lesson-learner pouring lube oil from a 55-gallon drum. It was sunny but frigid with winds whipping at around 50 mph. Someone had forgotten to top 'er off before we left our last port, and the only way to get lube oil on board was through this obscure two-inch piping connection beneath a brass fitting on the port deck near the aft superstructure.

You've added oil to your engine, right? A funnel really helps. For some reason, a pump and a hose or even a funnel were out of the question, so we poured. We gently tipped the 300-pound drum and... missed. A lot. Gusting 50-mph winds blew our little stream of lube oil all over the deck. After 45 minutes of this we had drained the barrel and put 30 or so gallons into the hole.

One down, six to go.

We fashioned a funnel somehow and began again, but the wind blew the funnel overboard. We shielded the lube oil stream from the wind as best we could and poured for hours. And as we poured, through chattering teeth I vowed that if anyone ever asked why-I-got-out-instead- of-reenlisting-and-wasn't-it-a-shame-cuz-I-could-have-retired-by-now I would remember this moment and smile, if not flip them off.

The other moment I vowed to remember was spending my first wedding anniversary in a dark, steamy night club in Subic Bay, the Philippines, then world-reknown den of iniquity, in the middle of a nine-month cruise, heartsick without Julie, feeling very sorry for myself, surrounded by barely-dressed Filipina "entertainers" shouting in my ear, grabbing at me, trying to con me into buying them overpriced drinks (which was only one way they made money,) while an AC/DC cover band screeched onstage and, mercifully, got better with every San Miguel I drank.

But this was supposed to be about the things I liked about the navy. I liked Sunday breakfasts with real eggs. The smell of bread baking when I came up from the engineroom for fresh coffee or bug juice. The awesome rooster tail at ahead flank. The cloudless sky and endless sea of stars in the Indian Ocean. The turbospeed bridge games we played in our living compartment lounge during lunch. The phosphorescence of our wake, and the dolphins playing in it. Sunrise in the Caribbean. Standing on the fantail in the morning with a tropical dew and a gentle breeze. The first step onto foreign soil. The adrenaline rush of restarting the turbine generators in casualty drills faster than anyone else onboard at the time. Eating popcorn from the ship's store while watching the evening movie. Camaraderie.

It wasn't all bad. I wonder what it's like now to go underway with email and the web available. Do they lessen the loneliness? Maybe not; maybe talking to people you can't touch is just as bittersweet now as before. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the tradition-bound surface navy hasn't given up rewarding the idiotic and the truly petty.

The "evil" one was in charge of domestic policy.

I thought it odd that I couldn't find a mention of our Raleigh high school in any story about Claude Allen. After a fruitless search of six or seven online bios of Claude, I explained it all to my favorite blogger, Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com.

Josh asked me if I was sure. I emailed him scans from my junior and senior yearbooks as proof. Soon, Josh found another WaPo biography of Claude that included his move to NC. "Looks like the Post telescoped his bio," Josh said. Sure enough. I apologized for the false alarm and thought nothing more about it. This was March 11.

On March 15, when the "evil twin" theory of Claude's crimes was bandied about, I saw this entry at talkingpointsmemo:

Now, through the miracle of the TPM research service, we've acquired these two scans of the two brothers from their High School yearbook, senior and junior year ...

It was great to see that TPM could use the scans after all. Turns out that the "research service" is Josh's nod to the TPM readers who contribute tips. Cool. :o)

By the way, one could easily tell the difference between Floyd and Claude just by talking to them. A videotape might peg one of them at Target, but an interview with the refund clerk would tell you which brother was there.

Oh-- and to be fair to Claude, here are my junior and senior year pictures. Remember, these were taken in the Dark Ages of Disco.

Suddenly I'm looking forward to my high school reunion.

Bush's Top Domestic Policy Adviser Arrested For Retail Theft Scheme After Abruptly Resigning... | The Huffington Post

I went to high school with this guy, Claude A. Allen. Even pulled out the yearbooks to verify the picture. We didn't foresee his greatness, though. The "Most Likely to Swindle Department Stores While Working for the Religious Right in a Presidential Administration" award went to some guy named Buford. I mean, the balloting wasn't even close.

The Raw Story | Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship

Wow.

Bush's Approval Rating Falls to New Low - Yahoo! News

Bush's Approval Rating Falls to New Low - Yahoo! News

The GOP hopes that Bush's low approval ratings won't stain the rest of the party that's up for election.

Hmm.

In other words, the GOP hopes that no one is paying attention. Because if you don't like the direction in which the country is going, and you don't like the war in Iraq, you should know that Bush is not entirely to blame. His party followed his banner. They lied for him. They refused to investigate the Executive branch whenever it overreached its power (and this administration is always overreaching.) The GOP enabled the most corrupt administration since Grant and now they hope we'll forget.

I suppose that's the only strategy left to them, considering that they're running away from their own criminal activities. They're also tarred by DeLay, Abramoff, Scanlon, Cunningham, Burns, Ney, Harris, MZM and Mitchell Wade... (I strongly recommend visiting the Grand Ole Docket for a thorough list of Republican criminality.)

These days, "GOP" stands for corruption.

Let's not forget. Throw the bums out.

Sowell: Divide Laborers to Conquer Labor

I don't go out of my way to read Thomas Sowell's column. It's in the Sunday Detroit News which I usually read over a latte and bagel at The Ugly Mug. Still, this one is worth mentioning.

Unions are bad. Baaaaad. They increase labor costs at someone else's expense. The minimum wage is bad because it increases labor costs. Increased costs mean lower profits and fewer jobs. Therefore, a low wage is the price we must pay in order to work. Those union workers, with their contracts, get undeserved benefits (according to a nonunion worker in the same job) that threaten to kill the golden goose. From the corporate point of view, labor is just another expense that must be minimized to maximize profit, and Sowell wants nonunion employees to help. No, not by raising nonunion salaries, silly, but by opposing union contracts. And so we begin the toilet spiral of wages in supply-side economics.

Of course, pitting the have-nots against the haves (in this case nonunion vs. union workers) is an ancient strategy. Feeding resentment on the low end of the economic scale -- the real have-nots in American society -- keeps us busy fighting over a small and shrinking pot of gold while the fatcats get tax cuts.

Did Sowell see the irony of his Toyota example? Corporations will actually pay higher wages just to keep unions out!

Duh. In other words, thanks to unions in some industries, non-union workers are treated well. I think that makes a good case for more -- not fewer -- unions.

Anybody got a number for the Wobblies?

Thom Hartmann | When Americans No Longer Own America

Thom Hartmann | When Americans No Longer Own America