licentious radio

Thursday, September 25, 2003
[9:06:12 PM]

"We were looking for a rock-climbing gym." --Pavel Lachko, Russian student arrested as international terrorist for riding his bike across the Arlington police parking lot.

"After all of this was finished, I was amazed to see a lot of Americans were eager to help me. They told me they didn't understand why it happened, and they were upset. In Russia, that wouldn't have happened. Nobody will support you like that, so it's a great lesson for me, a great experience."

Honest, people. *Everybody* loves his or her country. What is unique about this country is *not* nationalism by hate-mongerers. What is unique is that many, many of us believe that the legitimacy of government comes from *us* -- the people. ("We, the people....")

These rights and liberties are not gifts from our government, or from our self-appointed leaders. These are "inalienable" rights that millions of Americans have fought for, and for which far too many of us have died.

The un-American bastards trying to steal our rights and liberties -- Bush and General Ashcroft to name two -- should damned well stop waving the flag when they spew their anti-American, fear- and hate-mongering trash. *Our* flag stands for men and women who are brave enough to live in freedom.

[5:21:52 PM]
"George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth[~]not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly." --from the introduction to The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, by David Corn.

[5:14:09 PM]
Political cartoon:

Schwarzenegger holding Huffington upside down, with her head in a toilet.

Huffington says: "This is how you treat women.

Schwarzenegger says: "I have a role for you in my next movie."

[4:36:20 PM]
Lieberman zings! "The foxes are protecting the foxes, and the middle-class hens are getting plucked. ...I want to make clear that I said 'plucked'.

[4:13:10 PM]
I guess we know Bush's election strategy. It isn't to extract us from Iraq. Nor is it to fix the catastrophic federal budget deficits to allow the economy to recover and create new jobs.

The strategy is to do more of what works for them -- bomb countries of brown-skins. Iran, Syria, and North Korea are all on track for next summer's bombing needs.

[3:41:58 PM]
The way to think about the Schwarzenegger-Huffington episode....

Schwarzenegger interrupted Huffington. When Huffington complained and suggested that it was an example of how Schwarzenegger treats women, Schwarenegger made a joke about stuffing Huffington's head in a toilet.

Whether or not interrupting Huffington was a matter of sexism, a joke about violence toward and humiliation of Huffington clearly is.

Even more apalling, most of the press seems to be letting Schwarzenegger off the hook. Expect that to change.

[11:47:28 AM]
Josh Marshall [talkingpointsmemo.com] nails it again:

"For quite some time this White House has functioned like a heavily leveraged business , an overextended investor that suddenly gets a margin call. To extend the business metaphor, the White House has been surviving not on profits but expectations of future profits or, in other words, credibility. The White House has been able to get the public to sit tight with a lot of objectively poor news (a poor economy, big deficits, bad news from abroad) on the basis of trust.

"But a combination of the manifest incompetence of the planning for post-war Iraq and the dishonesty of the build-up for the war have become increasingly difficult to defend or deny. And that's struck a grave blow against the president's credibility.

"Credibility of course is unitary. And the erosion has ricocheted from foreign policy to domestic policy and back again in escalating fashion. Suddenly the White House's explanations for why the country has fallen back into half trillion dollar deficits are ringing hollow.

"As we've seen recently, a hollowed-out company can push along for some time so long as no one takes a good look at the books or calls in their loans. But when it happens the fall can be dramatic."

[11:24:17 AM]
Thomas L. "Looneybird" Friedman makes a sane point about Iraq. Notably, he's repeating somebody else's analysis:

"Here, he [Clyde Prestowitz] says, is the Bush war on terrorism: Preach free trade, but don't deliver on it, so Pakistani farmers become more impoverished. Then ask Congress to give a tax break for any American who wants to buy a gas-guzzling Humvee for business use and also ask Congress to resist any efforts to make Detroit increase gasoline mileage in new cars. All this means more U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

"So then the Saudis have more dollars to give to their Wahhabi fundamentalist evangelists, who spend it by building religious schools in Pakistan. The Pakistani farmer we've put out of business with our farm subsidies then sends his sons to the Wahhabi school because it is tuition-free and offers a hot lunch. His sons grow up getting only a Koranic education, so they are totally unprepared for modernity, but they are taught one thing: that America is the source of all their troubles. One of the farmer's sons joins Al Qaeda and is killed in Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces, and we think we're winning the war on terrorism.

"Fat chance."

Presto chang-o! Sanity from Friedman. All it takes is for him to write columns about what *other* people think.

[11:15:15 AM]
"I have a perfect part for you in 'Terminator 4'." --Arnold Schwarzenegger

In Terminator 3, Schwarzenegger stuffs a woman's head in a toilet. More bizarrely, he enthusiastically defends stuffing her head in a toilet with the excuse that the "character" was a robot.

Now Schwarzenegger publicly implies he wants to stuff Arianna's head in a toilet?

Schwarzenegger should withdraw and apologize. The suggestion of violence and humiliation against a political opponent is completely out of line.

This should end Schwarzenegger's political career.

[10:19:25 AM]
How bad are the Diebold voting machines?

The way I understand it, they record votes in a standard Access database file. Anyone with a copy of Access can change the votes. There is no other audit trail.

With paper ballots, there is an audit trail. Effective fraud would require co-conspirators at many voting stations. You can't get away with fraud that requires hundreds of people across a state to keep silent.

By contrast, Diebold's system would allow a single corrupt individual to make widespread, untraceable changes in the vote. Is it an accident that Diebold is run by staunch right-wing extremists?

[10:07:16 AM]
"Osama who?" --George W. Bush

[10:06:07 AM]
Ahnold's photo spread by Mapplethorpe bring new meaning to "full disclosure" in politics.

[10:01:50 AM]
Humorously, one reporter bothered to look back at what Rice and Powell said about Iraqi so-called WMD *before* the con-job to conquer Iraq. One reporter. Two years late.

Rice and Powell both stated as fact that Saddam had no such weapons.

What do you know... they were right.

It's good to know that they are lying whores*, not total idiots.

* "Whores" in the sense of saying anything for money, with the added tinge that they are complicit in high crimes. We don't mean to malign women who can't find a better way to support themselves than by selling sex.