licentious radio

Monday, February 10, 2003
[11:19:47 PM]

This is Day 511 of Dim Dubya's all-out, dead-or-alive man-hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Helen Thomas: This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.

[10:54:07 PM]
Darn! All we read about these days are naked women laying about spelling out anti-war slogans. Why aren't these women laying about in Menlo Park? *We'd* be against the war if there were just some naked women spelling out "No Bush" with their bodies. Why are women leaving Menlo Park to the warmongers?

[6:21:35 PM]
"Saddam Hussein regards the Iraqi people as human shields, entirely expendable, when their suffering serves his purposes," Mr. Bush said at a convention of religious broadcasters in Nashville, Tenn. "America views the Iraqi people as human beings who have suffered long enough under this tyrant."

Hmm. America may view the Iraqi people as human beings, but Bush seems to think they have big targets drawn on their heads, with flashing lights saying "Jesus would drop a bomb right here".

In other Bush humor, El Stupido was talking to Chirac, reading from a note card that Saddam "could one day supply terrorists with deadly weapons secretly, without fingerprints."

Chirac, trying to speak in terms the Mad King could understand, reportedly said, "And monkeys might fly out of my butt."

[5:49:19 PM]
Propaganda from the Republican Corporate Media....

One tactic is to accuse their enemies (first) of whatever they have done, or are about to do. Thus Hitler accused Poland of invading Germany (it was really German soldiers in Polish costumes) before unleashing the blitzkrieg.

Here is Safire, mocking the Germans for not knowing a letter was being passed around:

"Schroeder was flabbergasted; he had no idea that this rejection of his anti-U.S. crusade was in the works. Think about that: a Wall Street Journal request started the round-robin letter; eight nations weighed in on its drafting and redrafting for days; but Germany's chancellor, with his vast intelligence system and diplomatic corps, was totally in the dark."

This is the same day that Colin Powell said he learned first from the media about the French/German proposal for Iraq. Powell and the Bushies look more clueless than Schroeder.

Another case.... A few day's ago the SF Chronicle's own right-wing kook shot off her mouth against gun registration, claiming it is a contradiction to be for gun registration but against "Total Information Awareness". Gun registration is supposed to be a huge blow to civil liberties, whereas TIA is only the equivalent of "a bank checking into your creditworthiness".

From my perspective, it's pretty easy to draw a distinction between putting your name in a database if you buy a gun, versus giving unaccountable bureaucrats access to all personal data of all citizens and residents. If you don't want to be in the gun registration database, don't buy a gun. Just like if you don't want to be in the dog registration database, don't buy a dog.

But the propaganda aspect of the article is that while we *already* have national-level gun databases, Ashcroft ordered that they not be used to track terrorists. So the contradiction about gun databases is really in the Bush administration, not on the side of people who want handgun registration.

Then you ask just whom Ashcroft seeks to protect.... It's really the Timothy McVeighs of the nation who might run afoul of gun registration databases -- the homegrown terrorists. Oh. And there was that sniper incident, wasn't there. Hmm. Suppose that Bush-Master sniper rifle had been registered and ballistically "finger-printed". That wouldn't interfere with using it to hunt deer, but we would have been able to stop that particularly murder spree much sooner.

[5:21:28 PM]
I don't believe reasons for war: German foreign minister [smh.com.au]: "Outside the meeting in the mid-19th century opulence of the Bayerischer Hof hotel in central Munich, around 20,000 anti-war demonstrators led by the city's mayor - who had put half-page adverts in newspapers calling on citizens to demonstrate - braved freezing temperatures and heavy snow to ram their message home."

[2:16:49 PM]
"Tony Blair will face the largest political demonstrations in British history with an expected turnout of 750,000 on Saturday, potentially the eve of a declaration of war on Iraq.

" 'Even the police, who are notoriously conservative, admit that this will be the largest gathering of people in London since VE Day in 1945,' said Andrew Burgen, of the Stop The War Coalition."

[11:06:45 AM]
Ariana Huffington [ariannaonline.com] spanks that corrupt thieving bastard, Snow: "Let's start with the fact that he was paid a king's ransom -- $10.1 million in 2001 alone -- for doing a downright crappy job. With Snow at the helm, CSX's profits shriveled and its stock underperformed its competitors' by two-thirds since 1991. His reign is a case study in one of the greatest abuses of corporate America -- the anti-Pavlovian delinking of performance and reward."

[10:58:15 AM]
Looks like the race to war just accelerated. Last week we were on track for mid-March invasion. After Powell's UN speech evidence turned out to be ridiculously lame, France and Germany started thinking up plans on their own. With the largest anti-war demonstration in the history of the planet scheduled for this weekend, the warmongers can't afford to wait and let the momentum continue to build. So the news yesterday is that Saddam's going to get a 48-hour ultimatum this weekend. You can't say we don't live in interesting times. Further evidence for immediate war is in the Pentagon's requisitioning of airliners to get the rest of the troops over immediately, and the State Department bringing home personnel from various countries that are within missile-reach of Iraq. Blair will present the "war now" resolution at the UN. The Bush people are cranking up the pressure on France and Germany, and bribing everybody else. Not to mention "Condition Orange" -- somebody, somewhere might be thinking of attacking an apartment building, sometime, maybe.

It's too bad the anti-war demonstrations weren't this past weekend. They would have given France and Germany a lot of cover.