Cities of the plain

By Capt. Fogg

There are people who give Free Speech a bad name; people who use any freedom the government protects to undermine and destabilize and overthrow that government and exploit the population -- and all for personal ( and corporate) gain.

Such are the shadowy, entities behind the multi-headed beast pumped into a frenzy by unaccountable and uncountable millions they get for the purpose: entities like SOCYBERTY.COM whose recent post was sent to me by a breathless Republican eager to impart the secret knowledge that no, President Obama did not give the order to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan because he is a dithering, indecisive coward and the reins of government have been pried from his trembling, black hands. You see, Leon Panetta had to "override" Obama with the help of cabinet members and that eye-rolling Minstrel Show clown is too afraid now to tell the truth. Holdouts like Valerie Jarett aren't telling us either because of the "investigation back in Chicago" but there was a silent coup and Obama is no longer in control.

"What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound."

Of course no news agency; not ABC or NBC or FOX or CNN or BBC or Deutsche Welle or al freakin' Jazeera knows about this, only SOCYBERTY.COM and all the other PAC funded heads of the same hydra who are cutting and pasting and posting these stories. Google it and you'll see. They have secret sources in the cabinet, you know, who will commit treason only for them.

Sure, we can see it as the desperate death throes of a humiliated racist party, a wicked witch melting and hissing on the floor, but I can't forgive it and I can't forgive the people who e-mail it around the country like some titillating photo of some stoned starlet getting out of a limousine in a short skirt. I can't forgive, I can't forget and while old Yahweh was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of ten good citizens, no God worth his scriptures would forgive a country that contained ten such unpunished liars as these.

COMMON RAPS, OREILLY FLAPS

And Jon Stewart enters the fray…

Last week, President Obama hosted the rapper, Common at the White House. Since he isn’t white and espousing poetry with Biblical overtones, the talking heads at Fox have jumped right on the kool-aide wagon over this latest action that proves Obama is a facist/Marxist/commie sympathizer who is not an American citizen.

Seems Common has joined others in criticizing the handling of the cases of two people convicted of killing cops. As with many cases from the 70s and early 80s, procedural errors and other questionable tactics in cases involving persons of color perpetrating crimes against whites and authority figures were often ignored and/or covered up.

The two individuals involved, Mumia Abu Jamal and Assata Shakur were not exactly pillars of society and both were once members of the Black Panthers and other activist groups. Both were put at the scene of the crimes they were convicted of but both cases also raise lots of questions about the fairness of the justice system.

OReilly threw down the debate gauntlet in front of Jon Stewart who eagerly accepted the challenge. The video of their exchange can be seen HERE.
While I think both of them are publicity sluts, whoring for ratings, I did find the exchange of some merit.

For one thing, OReily tips his hand to his true objections when he questions why this rapper who is not identified as a poet should have been invited to the White House at all. Apparently Bill is now an artistic aficionado and all artists invited to the White House need his seal of approval. He adds weight to his remarks (in his mind anyway) by asking the rhetorical, “Do you know how many poets would have loved to be invited to the White House?” Jon showed class and restraint in NOT answering, “I don’t know, Bill – how many?”

I am sick and tired of angry, old white men, born of privilege and entrenched in their own racist, bigoted beliefs continually trying to regress society to a prehistoric social system. STFU!!!!!!!

I am heartened by Stewart’s reasoned responses as well as Obama’s recent smack down of the birther debate led by that cotton-haired loonie, Trump. Obama weathered the scrutiny of his (non)relationship with Bill Ayers and I think this latest pseudo-outrage will also become Common.

In the meantime, we have quite a few groups in this country working to review cases and bring true justice to victims by ensuring that not only is justice served fairly but that it is served on the actual perpetrator of the crime. The fact that these groups exist and are finding errors and wrongful convictions does not speak highly of how our justice system has operated thus far. This SHOULD be the topic of discussion.

The knock on the door

By Capt. Fogg

We've got a hard core Socialist Radical in the White House if you listen to people like the Koch Brothers -- and make no mistake, we do listen to them whether we want to or not and whether the slander comes from their mouths or the thousand mouths that speak their words. Yet the slide toward the right, the slide toward authoritarianism, the slide toward the business of America being war, continues without much popular resistance. Unless you mean the resistance of the voters of course but the voters don't matter since they're drawn along like hyena puppies following their mother, snarling about Socialism and Taxes.

Can we blame Obama, who hasn't done much to stop the wars, close the torture chambers and offshore prisons, end the DADT charade, temper the growing power of the Executive Branch or give us the kind of transparency in government we were promised? Sure we can, but if every naive campaign promise had been acted upon, we'd still have a long way to go to stop that slide.

Even while the Republicans, including my own Representative Tom Rooney, (R-FL) are howling about Obama exceeding his powers by authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya, his party has proposed giving the president even more war powers. The House Armed Services Committee's National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the United States to use military force anywhere there are terrorism suspects, including within the U.S. itself, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, yes, I know, you hate the ACLU Libtards, but I don't suppose you like the idea of a president sending the marines to your neighborhood or invading any country the president suspects may be harboring "terrorists" either. As it stands there was little opposition in the house save for one member of the House Armed Services Committee: Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) who was the sole dissenter. Now let's all raise our right arms and shout "Libtard."

The President didn't ask for this awesome power boost. He didn't suggest that he needed it. He didn't ask for the extra billions in military spending or another extension of the Afghanistan War. It was the smaller government folks. It was the Republican House hissing with a forked tongue from both sides of their smirking mouths.

Yes, we're sliding and it's not toward Socialism but toward a military/police surveillance state. It's the courts, like the Indiana Supreme Court that has handed us a ruling suggesting that Indiana Police no longer need warrants nor to be in hot pursuit nor need they have probable cause to enter and search your home for any reason - and may beat hell out of you with impunity if you "resist."

“A right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,"reads the decision.

And we're babbling about Planned Parenthood and NPR and the ACLU Commies and against right of the government to flood some fields to save millions of people or take poison of the store shelves in violation of sacred property rights. We're fantasizing about being economic secessionists free or restriction or responsibility. We're oozing lofty proclamations about property rights and the government of no government like medieval monks talking about angels and pinheads and hunting for witches and heretics.

Obama can't fix this and all the Republicans can do is offer people like Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann. Maybe we can't fix it either and if you want to know who's to blame, you need look no farther than your bathroom mirror.

Why we need Ron Paul

by Capt. Fogg

I rather hope Ron Paul becomes the Republican presidential candidate in the next election. It's true that I agree with some of what he says, some of it quite strongly and it's true that I disagree as well and just as passionately, but if he is Barack Obama's challenger, the nature and tone of the debates and the wider campaign will have to address some fundamental assumptions that always are ignored. One of the many fundamentals that separate the left from the new right is the ranking of rights in our society. Paul asserts what most of his party would rather hide beneath heaps of polemical hyperbole: Property rights are the basis of freedom and being thus fundamental, must not be abridged for the common good.

I'm one of those people, you see, who thinks all ethics, or at least all ethical judgements are situational and that what we like to call fundamentals is an abstract construct, a bit like Euclidean geometry, which is immune from other, perhaps decisive factors. Parallel lines do indeed intersect in a universe with curvature and morally clear decisions become less clear when they have to cope with the purpose of morality and ethics.

Speaking to Chris Matthews last week, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) declared that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- not because he's a racist, and to be sure he says he would have desegregated government institutions like schools, but because the rights of property owners are fundamental to our basic freedoms; freedoms that our constitution implies, are rights inherently and independently fundamental as they stand. Is he insisting that those with no property have fewer or no rights? That's up to him to clarify and I expect he would like the oportunity.

“I believe that property rights should be protected,”

says the man from Texas. Who would disagree when that's presented in the abstract? But life isn't an abstract thing and may I defend building a nuclear waste dump next to Manhattan because of that declared axiom? Are property rights part of a constellation of rights all designed by humans to make human life free of certain abuses? Are rights, like Newton's laws, fundamental or descriptive? If they are things invented by the people and for the people, to what purpose were they invented; to protect the one against the many or the many against the one or both? Do they apply equally at all points on the long curve or are only around the middle where we experience things?

I'm sure Paul would have to admit with liberals, that there are limits to "fundamental" rights, but just what those are and for what reason those limits are put there needs to be dragged out of the cave and into the light. Do rights exist for the benefit of people and if so does the right of one man always trump the right of every man? Are we here for the law or is the law here for us? Do the rights of all really flow from the rights of an individual or are individual rights sometimes an impediment? If there is an impediment to that road to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, must 300 million of us endure it so that the abstract right of one may be protected? Yes, that's extreme, but as with Newton's laws, it's the extremes that absolutes are shown not to be so. In short, can Libertarian theory produce a country that any of us will want to live in - in whole or in part?

(Of course if I were to debate him, I would, in my quasi-deconstructionist way ask him what he means by property and whether that question isn't more fundamental because without asking that, defending property rights can defend slavery or rape and some slightly worse things.)

We need to talk about it. We've been stuck at this point for too long. These concerns aren't new and they aren't going away and we all need to rethink our opinions at a fundamental level as a regular practice. I think Paul and Obama are both well qualified to do it and will do it -- and if we have to endure another hysterical fugue about flag pins and death panels and birth certificates and Communism aimed at the stupidest elements of the population; lies and slander and tactical statements of opinion that a moment may reverse - - well let's just say that the civil war doesn't need to be fought this way again.

Paranoid psychosis is the new normal.

Gather ‘round, children. Let me tell ‘ya how things was when I was your age.

Now, when I was young, fringe conspiracy theories were still kept... well, in the fringes. My father was a West Point grad, and as such, sentenced to life as an Army officer; we weren’t exactly flaming radicals and pot-smoking hippies around my house. You had your John Birch Society, but nobody "respectable" belonged to it since the Fifties. On the other side of the coin, there were "those radicals" (technically, an attitude left over from the Sixties, but there you are); they weren’t exactly in the majority in society, and were pretty universally looked down on, too. Generally, expressing a sentiment in public that didn’t fit into the "mainstream" was likely to either get you into a lively debate, or cause people to edge away from you (depending on who was around).

I’d run into fringe ideas every so often, but perhaps less than some people.
I still remember the woman in the kaftan nursing her baby and giving me a glowering side-eye as I, naïve military-brat that I was, cheerfully pored over independent-press books explaining how vaccinating children was another example of the white man keeping the black man down, by poisoning his naturally healthier immune system. That "we must return to the land of our ancestors." That white men were solely responsible for black people being poor. (OK, so in later years I'd learn that this last, while perhaps not even mostly true, did have a certain core of reality...)

I loved some of the fringier ideas: ghosts, UFO's, psychic powers. But for the most part, I always wondered why people would fall for some of the most unmistakably ridiculous ideas.

So, flash forward around three decades or so. And we have people openly believing the most paranoid, ridiculous crap that has ever left a skidmark on a page. And the majority of the sweat-stained stupidity seems to emit from the Right side of the argument.

I mean, if you think about it, it does make a certain amount of sense. First, we had the Clinton Years, where the Right was trying to paint him as a murderer, thief, rapist and philanderer (and as it turns out, one of those was true).

And if you follow that with the Bush Years, where the party in power is trying to build that power up through the force of fear,
aided and abetted by an entire television network devoted to spreading their strange lies, you have a people softened up to believe just any ridiculous pile of idiocy that people tried to feed them.

Oh, I'm sorry. America didn't believe ignorant crap under Bush? You mean, like the multi-billion dollar Fortress of Evil bin Laden had dug into the Pakistani mountains? Or that Iraq could attack the US with unmanned drones any minute now!

But the Huntsmen of Greed failed to keep a tight enough rein on the Horses of Insanity, and, as these things so often do, Entropy entered into the picture and everything fell into chaos.

Actually, to an extend, the Huntsmen of Greed can be blamed for the collapse of their own fiendish plans; it was Rupert Murdoch, after all, who gave Glenn Beck a national stage, and thereby mainstreamed some of the most hair-flamingly batshit conspiracy theories - perhaps we can point to him, but perhaps Murdoch was merely giving in to forces already beyond his control.

Whatever the reason, drooling lunacy has taken over much of the Right Wing, and the politicians of the Gibbering Old Paranoid party, not willing to give up the tattered remnants of whatever power they might have had, are willingly being swept along in the tidal stream of tempestuous Teabaggers: the only strategy left for these figureheads at the bow of the boat of Bedlam at this point, is to obsess over trivialities, to keep the wild-eyed crowd that's carrying them from focusing on real issues.

The rabid weasels who imagined "death panels" and "Obama reeducation camps," and were able to convince the masses that these things exist, are finding themselves overwhelmed by the forces that they, themselves, unleashed, not imagining that throwing open the Gates of Madness might allow more through the door than they had predicted.

We have entire websites devoted to the idea that America has been taken over by a radical, terrorist-loving, Marxist socialist fascist tyrannical Satanic Islamic atheist Kenyan whose sole aim in life is the utter destruction of all that we hold dear.

We'll ignore the biggies: Townhall, Pajamas Media (that plucky, faltering startup of lunacy), Glenn Beck's the Blaze, and look even farther down the ramp, where the gibbering is loudest.

The most obvious of these black holes of idiocy is World Net Daily, where, just dipping into the rancid pools of whatever passes for journalism there, we can discover a banner headline proclaiming:

Birth certificate doesn't meet Hawaii standards
Image White House released 'may not be a certified copy'
(WorldNetDaily Exclusive)

Yes, Joseph Farah, the publisher and Birther-In-Chief at WND, can't let go of the idea that Barack Obama is the result of a plot forty years in the making, because there's no way that a black man could get elected as President of the United States, right?

In fact, scrolling down the page, we find no less than ten other birther-related stories (and three ads) before we come to the "international coverage" - if, by "international," you mean the-Middle-East-but-mostly-Israel (because we can't have the Rapture if Jerusalem falls, after all...). The overriding focus of everything WND-related is that Obama has taken over the country, and is struggling to put Sharia Law in place.

Other websites can't manage this kind of message discipline, of course. Renew America, for example, has a shotgun blast pattern, with stories on "Obama is a hypocrite!"; "raising the debt ceiling will destroy America!" (a Newsmax crossover!); a story stolen from Fox News telling us that George Soros, a liberal, has "ties" to news organizations (with nary a mention of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, of course); Michelle Malkin and her latest "one-lunatic-equals-Islamic-conspiracy" rant; and a string of other "news" items.

The "news," though, is not the entertaining part of RenooAmurika: that would be the columnists (splayed out along the left-hand border, ironically). There we find such notables as:

Jeannie DeAngelis: a housewife and grandmother who conflates things like the USDA studying children's eating habits and illegal immigration; she crossposts at the American "Thinker" and her own blog Jeannie-ology (with the hilariously unself-aware banner "WHERE WHAT STARTED AS A CATHARTIC EXERCISE TURNED INTO AN OBSESSION!" All caps, of course, but with only one exclamation point. This is self-control, for Jeannie.)

Randy Engel: claims to be "one of the nation's top investigative reporters," but that's only if you add the codicil "...in the field of Abortion and Stem Cell Research are Eugenics!"

Bryan Fischer: American Family Association member who I might have mentioned once or twice, who only occasionally branches out from "all gay, all the time."

Judie Brown: president and co-founder of the American Life League, who chronicles the decay of the Catholic Church. Oh, and abortion.

Among so many, many others.

From there, we can move on to the already mentioned American "Thinker," which doesn't even bother with the false patina of respectability of the "news" features that RescrewAmerica pastes to the wall. They go straight to the crazy, with columns and inane ramblings by anybody who walks by, as long as they can spew spittle when repeating the phrase "Obama is destroying America!" Some of their winners include:

Robin of Berkeley: a self-proclaimed former ("recovering") liberal, she also claims to be a psychologist, despite the fact that she is willing to diagnose full-blown clinical psychosis based on second-hand reports (or two-line responses from people who argue with her). Irony has no place in Robin's world.

Chuck Rogér: Despite the suspiciously French last name (probably born named "Charles" - pronounced "Shar"), he's more of a generalist, finding the death of Society-As-We-Know-It ("we" being white and male, of course) in Sex Ed courses that actually mention condoms. (Because we know how successful Abstinence Only courses are. Right, Bristol?)

Bruce Whitsitt: One of many authors who've only puked out three or less articles, explains how all leftists hate cops and police, and the police should never be chastised for killing the wrong person. Because they don't. And even when they do, it's not their fault.

Lloyd Marcus: Apparently only has one theme: "I'm black, and I hate Obama!"

Of course, for the deepest, blackest pit of ugliness, there's no place better than Free Republic. Ironically, although "freeper" is the commonly used slang term for this particularly virulent species of paranoid racist, "freep.com" is actually the website for the Detroit Free Press. Don't make that mistake!

And there are thousands of little, lesser websites - sweaty loners sitting in their basements, blogging away amid the cases of canned food and ammunition. They're all out there, willing to believe any ridiculous fantasy that comes down the pike. As long as it proves that they're right, and the end of the world is coming and it's the liberals' fault!

They rant, they rave, and they grind their teeth down to nubs, equating Barack Obama with every "villain" in history. Was he Hitler? Marx? Stalin? Mao? Satan? Or even Che Guevara? What about Genghis Khan?

(Quick hint - when looking for Che Guevara links, use the additional tag "-flag" - some low-level Cuban staffer working for the Obama camp put a Cuban flag with the image of Guevara on a wall during the election - probably a bad idea.)

It doesn't matter what you imagine as the most catastrophic event in the history of the universe - there will be someone out there who will find a way to blame it on Barack Obama.

I am not an animal

By Capt. Fogg

Said the elephant man, and we know what he meant, but of course if we divide all living things between, viruses, plants, bacteria and so on, you'll find that humans, or most of us anyway, are animals. There was no point in our evolution when we suddenly broke the connection with our past and became something other - we're just big brained apes.

Big brained apes who like sex however, should stay out of Florida says Southern Fried Science with tongue firmly implanted in Southern cheek, since the language of Florida's latest legislative idiocy Law that outlaws sex with or the enjoyment of watching the sexual activities of animals, would outlaw sex between human animals -- as well as watching porn, human or animal -- unless you're a veterinarian or horse breeder of course, in which case, saddle up!

"An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices"

Ok, ok, I'm stretching the point, since Florida law does distinguish between human and non human animals and since this one doesn't use the word "person," that Spring Break escapade in Daytona isn't necessarily going to get you locked up, but of course in the Bible belt, evolution never happened in the first place, we're not animals but animated mud and so no foul here. Sorry to have bothered you.

Freedom is slavery

By Capt. Fogg

A mind is a terrible thing to make up, uncertainty being a fundamental building block of nature, but I've come close to making up my mind that a mind is, unlike all other things, not really subject to change and so those who spend their time trying to change minds damn themselves to a great deal of suffering.

So then, I'm not going to try to convince you that Rand Paul is having another one of his captious fallacy fests by trying to convince us all that if one believes that Americans have a right to have a certain degree of health care, one believes, ipso facto, in slavery.

Why try to go through his tortuous logical progressions and attempt to refudiate them as factually or logically false? Why indeed, since humanity runs on a blend of unconscious bias and packaged rationalizations. Who would read the list of ingredients on a pack of cigarettes anyway and who bothers to question politicians who mock people you don't agree with? We just inhale and we like it and we come back for another pack.

So, to reiterate the claim that freedom from untimely death is slavery will be enough for me this sunny morning when I should be enjoying life instead of following the lives of celebrity idiots. I'll just leave it to you. You may think of Orwell and smile, you may dream of being the only man in the world and growl in approval, you may jump off a cliff, you may do as you please. I've got mine and screw all y'all, as it says on the Tea Bag and if my wake upsets your boat, or you're thrashing about in the water, screw you twice, loser -- I'm nobody's slave.

An Iceberg in the Sea of Ethics

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.--Earl Warren

I've been thinking a lot about the killing of self-proclaimed terrorist, Osama bin Laden. My issue is not with the guilt or innocence of Osama bin Laden. He has declared himself responsible for 9/11; even if he's not, just wanting the credit suggests that if not 9/11 then he is responsible for other acts of terrorism. However, even if the police catch a person strangling the body with bare hands that person is still entitled to dues process under our laws which means a trial, a judgment, and a sentence. Even if that sentence is death, we don't simply execute someone without the benefit of due process, even when guilt is certain. Indeed, in our justice system, confession is about brokering a deal generally to take the death penalty off the table. In other words those who declare I did it gain a reprieve from execution and generally receive a sentence of life imprisonment in exchange for saving the state the cost of a full prosecution.

Traditionally, adherence to a system of justice that strives for fairness and an even application of law is taken as a significant mark of civilization. We, as a nation, certainly criticize and strongly object to the paths of nations that imprison without trial, punish without due process, and eliminate undesirable elements by simply executing them.

Our track record in recent years has not been good. We invaded Iraq based on false information which more and more evidence supports that our leadership knew to be false. We have imprisoned people at Guantanamo without benefit of trial which violates the Constitution in which many of us purport to believe. We have consistently refused to acknowledge that these prisoners, who haven't been officially charged with anything, have a right to a speedy trial, having made up a new term to apply to them, "enemy combatants." They are neither prisoners of war nor prisoners of our legal system, expressly so that they may be denied the due process owed under military law or civil law. I think the summary execution of bin Laden is yet another misstep on the part of this country. We insist to others that it is not might that makes right but that laws ensure justice for all. Yet in this instance we behaved much the same as any of the governments whom we have criticized in the past, acting as judge, jury and executioner and bypassing even a semblance of justice. Papa Doc and Idi Amin should not be our role models.

Funny thing is, the outcome would have been the same. No doubt bin Laden would have been found guilty and sentenced to death but in the eyes of the world we would have appeared to adhere to the higher standard for which we have so strongly advocated since the founding of this country. We haven't always reached that standard, but if a man or a woman's reach does not exceed his or her grasp, then what's a heaven for? (my thanks to Robert Browning)

I take issue with assassination as justice, no matter how vile the person. When we make exceptions to our ethics, to our code of law,  we lessen ourselves, betray our own integrity. My concern isn't for bin Laden, but for this country's ability to claim moral authority (which we do quite often) after this assassination. Imagine any other country entering a nation uninvited and killing a person who by its own account was not armed because of some terrorist act that person allegedly committed against its people, how would we regard that action?

Fellow blogger, Elizabeth, shared a passage from an article by Noam Chomsky that fleshes out my rhetorical question.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's, and he is not a "suspect" but uncontroversially the "decider" who gave the orders to commit the "supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

The Florida Legislator Who Stares at Goats

By Octopus

What makes this year different from all other years? Florida State Senator Nan Rich will finally get her wish: Her long awaited No-Sex-With-Nanny-Goats law. Senator Nan has been crusading for this law since 2006 when a man from Mossy Head Florida allegedly asphyxiated the family goat during an act of deep-throat. Although the suspect was never charged, he was detained months later in a separate goat abduction case.

“There's a tremendous correlation between sexually deviant behavior and crimes against children and crimes against animals," says Senator Nan, confirming what we have long suspected: Goats are a gateway animal leading to more serious crimes.

Approved by unanimous votes in the Florida House and Senate, the new anti-bestiality law targets those who derive, or help others to derive, “sexual gratification” from animals. The new law exempts animal husbandry and their wives, and judges who fondle dogs at dog shows.

Whether or not the new law passes constitutional muster is another matter. In 1971, the Florida Supreme Court struck down a similar law written in 1868 on grounds of being overly vague and overboard. The old law prohibited the "abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with beast.''  Is the new law similarly flawed?  Will it apply, for example, to consumers of insect pornography:

Will dog owners be prosecuted for aiding and abetting their leg-humping hounds and masturbating mutts?  Will citizens be prosecuted for watching how laws are passed in the Florida State Legislature:

Will every citizen be held accountable when “smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open yë …”

Of course, one accidental goat death cannot compare to the goals and objectives of this organization, The Florida Meat Goat Association.  In Florida, where bestiality and necrophilia conspire, you can always count on the state legislature to beat a dead horse.

More lurid legislative tales from the Swash Zone here, here, and here.  Next: Meet Governor Grifter of the Sunshine State.

The quality of mercy

There's been a lot of talk about my country losing it's soul because we finally managed to off one of the most dangerous mass murderers of the last few decades, who was still involved in plotting to kill thousands more.

I was raised to believe than any man's death diminishes my own life and that it's wrong to celebrate it, but although that's what I still believe in general, it never occurred to me to think those people famously pictured in Times Square on VJ day, were doing anything immoral or that they should instead have been in morning for the enemy dead. They were celebrating the end of the killing of millions. They were celebrating life and survival, which are as close to victory as we mortals can get.

In the celebration of the Passover, Jews customarily withhold a drop of wine in remembrance of the Egyptian soldiers said to have died in pursuit of the fleeing slaves. It's a nice gesture I've always thought well of, but although I consider the deed done by the US Navy to be a solemn one; one that shouldn't include parading impaled skulls or photos of the dead in some barbaric way, I'm glad they did it at long last. Think of what might have been and what might not have been had it been done 10 years ago instead of waging war.

I have to wonder what the world would have been like if someone had managed to invade Germany's sovereignty and Adolph Hitler's personal liberty by assassinating him in his living room in 1936. Can we really call the men who plotted to kill him morally bankrupt or brave heroes? No, I think this would be a better world if we hadn't had to do it the hard way, if you'll forgive one of the largest understatements ever made. I could think of other horrors involving the death of tens of millions and the suffering of hundreds of billions that could have been averted by such actions.

Of course, you can see that I'm not a moral absolutist who sees morality as a set of fixed rules not subject to interpretation or to extenuating exceptions, nor do I see the law as something that should stand in the way of justice or even do I believe in a mercy to one whose life has been a celebration of mercilessness to thousands of innocents. I saw no moral dilemma involved in the choice to hunt down the people who murdered innocent athletes in Munich and I see none whatever in the killing of Osama bin Laden. I find the torture of suspects far more repugnant, yet not quite so much as sawing Daniel Pearl's head off -- or most importantly the acts of terrorism bin Laden arranged. Can we even talk of such people being owed any respect or consideration or mercy much less bemoan of how wicked we are by exterminating them on or off the battlefield?

I certainly see less national soul loss than we incurred in the bombing of Iraq, the destruction of tens of thousands of lives and the exile of millions just to kill one dictator - the loss of civilian life in the bombing of Dresden or Hanoi or Tokyo, to name a few.

No, I'm sorry. Respect for human life is not diminished and in a way is affirmed by violating the 'sovereignty' of Pakistan and the sanctity of Osama's bedroom and standing on principle against it requires a kind of selective set of values that mystify me. I cannot morn the murderer in the same way or to the same degree as the murdered and if I have a soul that mourns or rejoices, I have it because of the timely deaths of all the evil men who would have killed me with a smile had they prospered. And think too of the souls that would have been lost to this man had he lived. Let's rejoice for their sake.

Come to New Mexico, Eric Bolling

So, the "special" students at Fox Business think torture is funny? Monica Crowley and Eric Bolling seem to think that it's just fine.

So here's a challenge for you, Bolling. Come on down to Albuquerque. You'll sign a release, and I'll waterboard you. And before I'm done, you will admit that you like to be ass-raped by Palestinians wearing tutus. On camera.

I guarantee it, you unamerican goat-fucker.

If you're a puss, I'll even have a doctor from the ER standing by. Come on down, son; I'll show you a real good time.

In fact, there are a lot of people out there claiming that torturing prisoners is just fine: hell, we got bin Laden because of our "enhanced interrogation techniques"! All of these people have suspiciously tiny penises (except for Ann Coulter - that reamed-out drag queen is hung like a horse).

Let's be clear here. It didn't happen. Over at Firedoglake, blogger emptywheel lays out the timeline. And the Rude Pundit (who, in the same post, explains other reasons it didn't happen that way) puts it best.

No scenario exists here that would justify the calculated mistreatment of people who were mistaken for terrorists.

What exists is the pathetic willingness of so, so many in this nation to cast aside our morality and laws for the expedience (no matter how long it took) of vengeance. Frankly, if the only way to get to bin Laden was waterboarding, the Rude Pundit would have rather bin Laden had stayed free. Because the Rude Pundit is more goddamned patriotic than any of these fuckers who put their animal instincts over the truly ethical principles that are supposed to guide us.

And you know who would back him up? Benjamin Franklin, man. In a mucho-quoted sentence, Franklin said, "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted." Except, of course, the false patriots of the right.

Aside from being morally repugnant to everyone but the completely unsalvageable pervert and sociopath, torture doesn't work. The person being tortured will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, true or false, just to get it to stop. You don't get "actionable intelligence" from torture: you get whatever the person being tortured thinks you want to hear.

John McCain broke under torture, and taped a confession calling himself an "air pirate" and "black criminal."

And in 1998, Qin Yanhong, a Chinese villager, confessed to the rape and murder of a woman he'd never met. Because he was tortured.

If you happen to be a Christian, remember that Christ was supposed to have been tortured before being crucified. How do you think He would feel about it? I mean, I thought all the fundamentalists watched Passion of the Christ because it brought them closer to Jesus. Not to masturbate.

Osama lives

By Capt. Fogg

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.

I've read that Mormonism is the fastest growing religion, but I doubt it. I think it's Denialism, at least in the USA; and yes, it's a religion. Like other religions, it offers peace and a feeling of importance, enlightenment, inclusion and a chance to be part of something bigger than oneself. You don't need to read any long and boring scriptures either and for ADD America, that's a major selling point. There aren't even a lot of commandments. "Whatever they say is a lie" covers most of it and almost anything can be denied: that the Apollo program ever landed anyone on the moon, that high bracket tax cuts boost the economy in a healthy way (or at all,) whether smallpox and Polio went away because of vaccines, and that oil reserves are finite -- and a long list of things.

It only takes a rare overthrow of scientific opinion or historical interpretation or the discovery of any actual conspiracy to cast a warm blanket of approval over all the tenets of Denialism. 30% of Republicans still believe the president, like John McCain, was born abroad. That's not going to change and any release of DNA tests or gory photos of bin Laden with the top left quadrant of his skull blown off and his homogenized brain oozing out isn't going to do more than put a bigger sneer on the face of Denialism.

Now I don't mean to say that all Republicans are Denialists or that all Denialists are Republicans by any means, but the biggest clamor for releasing the gruesome pictures and videos is from the right side of the aisle and from thence comes the argument that there's a huge worldwide "debate" about whether the bogey man is dead. Claiming that there is a "debate" that involves any participants outside the faith is, by its own right, is an act -- a typical act -- of Denialism. I'd be amazed to see evidence that any large part of humanity questions the demise of Osama as a fact but I'd be more amazed if the media doesn't continue to milk the manufactured controversy and politicians don't attempt to cash in on it.

To be sure, there were debates about whether Hitler was dead for many decades; whether Josef Mengele was dead or Martin Bormann. We had no pictures, no tissue samples and no credible witnesses, but although one of those men did indeed survive the war, the belief never really was about the evidence, but about sustaining the holy state of denial and the profitable state of fear. After all we still have substantial belief that Jesus didn't really die or the Hidden Imam or Elvis. The Princess Anastasia cult may still have some hangers on. Denial after all, is faith and to be human is to have faith and the maintenance of faith often forces a choice between pain and denial; forces us to create other forms of reality where our heroes and loved ones live -- and sometimes our bogeymen. The loss of bin Laden is, like the loss of the Soviet Union, a setback for fearmongers, after all. Profiteers who even now are assuring us that revenge will be swift.

But Osama bin Laden is dead and time will only confirm that Osama bin Laden is dead and as the President said, he's not coming back, ever. Which is another way of saying that like Elvis, Jesus, Satan and the Buddha, he's always going to be with us.

Uppity

By Capt. Fogg

I can't laugh, or smirk too hard since it's pretty easy to mix up the names Osama and Obama even for those who don't have old age as an excuse. But when Glenn Beck came up with “lets kill Obama” would not be “a tough call to make” the other day, it certainly had to raise an eyebrow even the eyebrow of one who long ago lost faith in Freud and his slips.

It's a different story though, when Beck had to temper his admission that some respect was due with the notation that the president seemed "a little arrogant." He didn't seem so to me even if I force myself not to remember his predecessors little end-zone dance on the flight deck where he had just pretended to land a fighter plane and with his parachute harness arranged to accentuate his manhood. I didn't notice any Foxers laughing that "mission accomplished" day -- quite the contrary, really.

Obama was a model of confident restraint as far as I'm concerned, but that's just what his paid detractors would prefer to call "uppity" if they hadn't been told not to. I mean, isn't the fellow who accomplishes what you've failed to do in ten years and without breaking a sweat or busting the budget going to feel a bit arrogant to you, even if he's a bit to classy do the victory dance and the high fives?

Swingin' round the circle

Long before we had Steven Colbert with his espousal of conservative views that reveal trenchantly cynical commentary beneath, we had Petroleum V. Nasby writing in the dialect of the South in praise of the "secessionists" and their northern friends the Copperheads. But it works both ways and the infamous Palm Beach man of the people, Rush Limbaugh is borrowing the technique to express his gratitude to God that we have a man in the White House like Barack Obama.

Such a character as Colbert uses takes strength and skill to maintain, but it's a strength that Rush either doesn't have or doesn't want to have. Like a dog who just can't sit still with the smell of bacon in the air, it didn't take long, yesterday night, for Limbaugh to crack under the strain of decency and honesty and reveal what hunger lies beneath.

"I, me, my, three of the most used words in President Obama's media appearance last night, not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, military adviser, came up with the idea...not one of them... according to Obama, had the ability to understand the need to get DNA. This was Obama's message last night,"

said Limbaugh. I suppose he simply didn't listen to the same speech I heard and perhaps he wrote the script before it even aired, but at any rate even the faux appearance of pleasure at our success in doing away with mass murderer Osama bin Laden was too much of a strain and the cynical, dishonest and slimy hate just had to come out.

No, Obama just couldn't be honest enough to admit that George W. Bush really was responsible for it. Couldn't resist telling us that it would have been better just to carpet bomb Abottabad and perhaps start another trillion dollar war against Andorra. He couldn't even be a man enough to admit being a Muslim and to stop fooling people with his birth certificate. But then what can we expect of a black man and a Democrat?

The eyes of Texas

By Capt. Fogg

It's no secret that Florida's economy is hurting more than that of many other states, but I'm sure it would be much worse if our sales tax cap on yachts costing more than a quarter million weren't in place. Of course mine didn't cost quite enough for me to benefit significantly, but it's gratifying that some of my friends saved enough to pay for a few thousand gallons of fuel. I'm sure it puts a smile on the faces of the many who have to choose between lunch money for the kids and driving to work. I'm sure that the several of my neighbors in foreclosure are altruistic enough to be glad those with that level of disposable income might use the savings on that Taiwan built vessel for an extra trip to the Abacos this summer.

Texas, which has a share of the yacht trade, is jealous, which is an extraordinary thing to say of our second biggest state with its continental sized self esteem. A Republican sponsored bill to cap the sales tax on yachts is now out of committee and will be considered by the Texas House along with deep cuts to education, nursing homes and other things that benefit only the surplus population.

The eyes of Texas are on taxes and the rest of us are watching.

America - Fuck Yeah!

You know, there are people out there who don't understand what it means to be an American!

I mean, you know what we learned today? That secret prisons where people got waterboarded led us to Osama!!!

Yeah! Waterboarding worked! How about that, libs? We got actionable intelligence by torturing somebody! Awesome, right?

I mean, yeah, there's this guy, Mohammed Basardah. He talked. He spilled all kinds of names and locations and everything else. They couldn't shut him up, he talked so much. They rounded up all kinds of people based on what he said. He gave them so much intel, they let him go out of gratitude for the help.

But, I mean, that's where it gets funny, right? Because Basrdah turns out to be just a small-time pot dealer in Mecca. He made up all this stuff, and threw in some names of people he didn't like, or that he'd heard of, or just fake names. So we round up all these people, and they have no idea what's going on, right? But we have "actionable intelligence" saying that they DO know, right?

So, they act like they don't know anything, and do we have a choice? Hell, no! We have to waterboard them to get the truth out! I mean, yeah, they don't know what the "truth" is, because it's just stuff Basardah made up, right?

But that's what's so funny!

Same thing with these people that the Pakistani tribes sold to us - they were just passing through, but we were offering thousands of dollars in bounties! What could the tribesmen do? How could they resist that kind of money? So they sold us tourists - can you blame them?

Now, we have these people in custody, and they claim they're innocent, right? As if! So we have to waterboard them, or chain them up, or do the sleep deprivation thing, until they answer us, right? I mean, do we have a choice?

You know, looking back, maybe there are some hippies who'll try to claim that when we torture innocent people, we might be making another generation of people who will stop at nothing to kill us. But what do they know, right?

Because we're Americans, motherfucker! We do what's right! Even if it seems like it's wrong! I mean, this is what we have got to do, right?

Right?

...right?

Finally!

So, ten years and several billion dollars later, we finally took the fucker down?

Let me just point out that in the coming week, right-wing pundits will try to claim that Obama should not receive any credit for this. Of course, in the meantime, all the evidence shows that Bush had the chance to get him and let him go. (After all, the unkillable boogeyman is a better way to get unlimited funds than a guy you pick up in the first few months of a manhunt.)
_________

Update: from Pam at Pam's House Blend:

Welcome to Abbottabad

Local forecast - partly cloudy, high 32°C, low 14° C … less one infamous tourist (terrorist).

The etymology of the name is a compound of two words, Abbott and Abad. Abbott refers to General Sir James Abbott, a British army officer after whom the city and the district are named.  Abad means a place of living in Urdu.  Note:  Abad is also the old English spelling of the modern word Abode.  Oh, yes.  Before I forget:

Obama got Osama!

Monday morning update: This article by Juan Cole, Obama and the End of Al Qaeda offers a worthwhile retrospective.

How Rebecca Black and Glee Are Destroying the World

Pitch adjustment has probably been around as long as there's been recorded music. George Martin is famously credited with getting two different takes of the same song, originally played at slightly different tempos, and splicing them together using a Vari-control pitch shifter to match them together (this is most obvious in the slight distortion in John's voice during the line "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...").

But then, in 1997, Dr Harold "Andy" Hildebrand, a former geophysicist studying seismic activity, developed and patented a process called Auto-Tune™. And in doing that, he may have destroyed the concept of music entirely.

Auto-Tune™ is phase vocorder, an audio processor which can be used both live and in recorded tracks, which adjusts the voice to the nearest true semitone and correct the pitch to match whatever scale is specified.

It can also be used to distort a voice - most famously, Cher's warble in 1998's Believe.

Auto-Tune™ is still considered the industry standard. In 2009, a 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory started a viral series of videos making extensive use of the technology.

Although the success of Autotune The News led to the first release of original music by the Gregory Brothers, the strategy backfired to a certain extent:

Andrew (Gregory, the guitarist in the group) also makes folk music, but, unfortunately, many of the Brothers' new fans have no patience for anything that's not "Auto-Tune the News."

But those are effects. The more insidious use of autotuning is its prevalence in the music industry. It's almost impossible to find a CD where a singer doesn't tweak, warp, or totally alter their voice.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

All of this leads to lazy singers, unwilling to practice; lazy musicians, happy to take someone else's work, loop it, and claim that the result is an "original" composition; and lazy performers who go on tour to lip-synch to their own music.

Sir Elton John's live reputation is second to none. Even when he's not actually performing.

His off-the-cuff remarks at the Q magazine awards ceremony last week, when he reacted with undisguised horror to the very notion of Madonna being nominated for best live act, surely represented the great singer-songwriter at his extemporaneous best. "Madonna, best f---ing live act? F--- off! Since when has lip-synching been live?"

At many of today's big live music events, the only thing that can really qualify as live is the dancing. I once saw Madonna drop her microphone without it affecting her vocal performance one whit.
...
It doesn't matter whether you have the pyrotechnic vocal skills of Michael Jackson or the somewhat more limited range of Kylie Minogue, you cannot throw yourself about like an aerobics instructor on fast-forward while delivering a perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal.

And in many cases, performers can't deliver a "perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal" in the first place.

If you watch Glee, a TV show ostensibly about singers, you won't hear a single note that hasn't been chopped up, glued back together, polished and shined until it's practically unrecognizable.

It's not just the lifeless characters, bad acting, unoriginal scripts and robotic music that can make Glee painful to watch, it's the unreality of the way music is portrayed. Characters burst into "song" without ever practicing a note. This leads to unreal expectations among young singers, that they don't need to rehearse (the Trophy Wife teaches voice, and runs into this problem on a daily basis) - they expect to just open their mouths and watch liquid gold flow out.

Which leads us to Rebecca Black. A 13-year-old girl from Orange County, her mother paid $2000 to the Ark Music Factory (the musical version of a vanity press) who gave her a choice of two songs; and after a 12-hour video shoot and a digital bludgeoning of the vocal track, she became an international sensation with an artificial song sung by a robotic voice with only a passing resemblance to her own.

Friday has been called "the worst pop song of all time," and that's a fair assessment. It's also symbolic of the place music has ended up: lifeless, heartless, pre-processed blandness; uninteresting gruel served to children who don't know any better than to call it "music."

It's time to grow up, America

Listen to this message. And remember one thing: the birther message that Donald Trump was able to ride was only possible because Barack Obama was black.

Would it have been possible for anyone, at any time, to make an ignorant claim like this, that Obama wasn't truly an American, if he had, in fact, been white? If his father had been Barry O'Bama, an Irishman, who'd gone back to the ancestral shores of Ulster, would anyone have been able to carry this ignorant, racist message as far as Donald Trump (and his media representative, Joseph Farah) were able to flog it?

Would anyone have cared if Obama was a white man?

(OK, I'll even add a caveat - "a white man with no Russian background"? Because, yes, they're that stupid...)

If Barack Obama wasn't different from "you and me" - if he wasn't "the other" - if he didn't seem "foreign"...

GOD DAMN IT!! If he wasn't black!

If Barry O'Bama was a white man raised in Chicago, would anybody have gone to the ignorant, racist extremes that the GOP has gone in the last 4 years?

Yes, if you ever worried about the birth certificate of the duly elected president of the United States, you are a useless, inbred racist fuck. You might as well pull out your bed-sheets with the eye holes cut out.

Welcome to the 21st Century.