Theocracy Now!

The new Max Blumenthal video, Theocracy Now!, has dropped. It's from the Values Boaters Bund. The usual gang of idiots appear. And while you're @ HuffPo, put down your huffing rag & read the piece on Rudy, by the woman who named the blog after herself. We're starting to look forward to a Giuliani presidency. He seems willing to express his rage, rather than repress it Bush-style. And that's bound to be more amusing. And we're only in it for the laughs. And the Schadenfreude.

The Heritage Foundation Presents

Had the misfortune to get up so early this a. m. that we saw the president on the telebision. You can too. What an asshole. The usual cliches, rendered post-meaningful through constant repetition by fools such as he who don't understand actual meaning. (Meaningless cliches highlighted in orange.)

One of the interesting things about the Heritage legacy is that the folks here have been tireless advocates, tireless champions of liberty, and free enterprise, and democracy and religious freedom. These are values that came under attack on September the 11th, 2001. Our nation was attacked by a brutal enemy that despises freedom, that rejects tolerance, that kills the innocent in the pursuit of a dark vision. These folks believe that it's okay to subjugate women and indoctrinate children and murder those who oppose their harsh rule. They have stated clearly they want to impose this ideology on millions. They're at war with America because they hate what they [sic] stand for -- and they understand we stand in their way.

The same old song & dance.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews -- and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

No mention of Grampa Prescott Bush building his treasure by dealing w/ Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis were running things. Just as we never hear from the White House about the involvement of Saudi subjects & the Saudi gov't. & royal family in terrorism, madrasas that indoctrinate children w/ radical Islam, etc. When do we deal w/ that repressive regime & its subjugation of women & its harsh rule?

I know that when I discuss the war on terror, some here in Washington, D.C. dismiss it as political rhetoric -- an attempt to scare people into votes. Given the nature of the enemy and the words of its leaders, politicians who deny that we are at war are either being disingenuous or naive. Either way, it is dangerous for our country. We are at war -- and we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.

America & its wars on Poverty, Drugs, Inflation; we've been so successful treating everything like WWII. Given the "nature of the enemy" we've been absolute idiots in our attempt to conquer a nation that did not attack us.

Judge Mukasey provided nearly six hours of testimony. He patiently answered more than 200 questions at the hearing. He has responded to nearly 500 written questions less than a week after his hearing. Yet the Senate Judiciary Committee has been holding up his nomination.

For Bush, quantity is quality. Six hours of testimony. 200 questions. Doesn't matter what Mukasey said, of course.

When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters. (Applause.)

One might think that he meant there should be no time wasted by Republicans on a motion of censure against MoveOn.org, & that he should have listened to the commanders on the ground & provided adequate body armor, properly armored vehicles, & enough troops to do the job in the first place, but that's not what he meant. And you should have heard him say "Code. Pink. Protesters," trying desperately not to screw up three little words. Those "P"s must be tough.

In the struggle against the terrorists and extremists, I hope I made my strategy clear today -- that we will keep constant pressure on the enemy in order to defend the American people; we will fight them overseas so we do not have to fight them here at home. (Applause.) At the same time, we'll use every available tool of law and intelligence to protect the people here. That's our most solemn duty. It's a duty I think about every day. In the long run, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to advance freedom as the great alternative to radicalism and repression.

Yes, they actually applauded at the "fight them there so we don't fight them here" line. They are that fucking stupid. And of course sending American corporations to make a nice capitalistic profit won't lead to any "radicalism and repression."

We're standing with those who yearn for liberty in the Middle East, because we know that when free societies take root in that part of the world, they will yield the peace we all desire. See, the only way the terrorists can recruit operatives and suicide bombers is by feeding on the hopelessness of societies mired in despair. And by bringing freedom to these societies, we replace hatred with hope, and this will help us to marginalize the extremists and eliminate the conditions that feed radicalism, and make the American people more secure.

I think Mr. Bush is making the liberal mistake of confusing the anarchy we brought to Iraq w/ freedom. Every "free" society that we "create" is going to vote the straight Islamo-fascist ticket, because they see us as crusaders imposing our values & religion on them. The American people, & our "liberties?" In increasing danger every day Bush is in office fucking things up.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Then-Col. Tibbets waves "bye-bye" before taking off to single-handedly eradicate a city. What a man. We need more like him to deal w/ the jihadi menace.

Paul W. Tibbets, Brigadier General USAF (Ret.) who somehow became or made himself the face & name of the Hiroshima bombing ceased all willed activity at the atomic level today at the age of 92.

WARNING!!! DANGER!!!!

We know you internet types, w/ your Chee-tos™ & what not. And your frozen pizza. So here's a public service announcement: Jeno's® & Totino's® Frozen Pizzas containing pepperoni are being recalled, due to the possibility of E. coli bacteria in the pepperoni. Tell mom to be careful when she's nuking your lunch today, basement dwellers!!
Some technical questions: Both of these fine products are made by the Pillsbury division of the General Mills Corporation. So why bother w/ two different brands, for what is essentially the same shit? Can anyone tell the difference between Jeno's® & Totino's®? Indeed, is there any difference other than packaging? Why the limited palette of Jeno's®:
Combination
Pepperoni
Sausage
Supreme
Cheese
compared to Totino's®:
Canadian Style Bacon
Cheese
Classic Pepperoni
Combination
Hamburger
Mexican Style
Mini Meatball
Pepperoni
Pepperoni Trio
Sausage
Supreme
Three Cheese
Three Meat?
What's the difference between "Classic Pepperoni" & "Pepperoni?" Not to mention "Pepperoni Trio?" Three pepperonis, all w/ E. coli? Why no Jeno's® Pizza Rolls®? Yet Totino's® has Pizza Rolls® & MEGA Pizza Rolls®?
Frankly, we here @ Just Another Blog™ are very confused. Can someone help us?

Brain Waves

Regular viewers may have heard The Editor mention one of his greatest regrets: He may not live long enough to see many of his fellow humans literally boiling in their own waste. Thus, he'll be deprived of the chance to say: "Nyah, nyah, told you so, but you wouldn't listen, would you? No, you knew more than the fucking climate science experts, didn't you? Ha ha ha!! Fucking know-it-alls. Boil, morons, boil!!"

It'd be a shame to miss a chance at that, wouldn't it?

Now we find a story indicating that we may have a chance for further mockery, this time of people too stupid to keep their brains from boiling into vapor.
[T]here tends to be a lag of many years between exposure to radiation and tumour growth but the number of cases already apparent suggest a much bigger problem to come.
"One would expect this to be only the tip of the iceberg because of the long latency of those diseases..."
[...]
Added to that is the increasing use of cellphones, especially by young people.

Stupid young people. They'll get what they deserve. We can only hope that the various types of radiation to which they're exposed will sterilize most of them.

Story brought to our attention by alex constantine's blacklist, whence we stole the graphic as well.

Halloween Extra

Here's an exciting costume idea:

Curtis allegedly donned women's clothing, red stockings and a black sequined lingerie top before engaging in a sex act at the store. He then continued to wear them throughout the night under his clothing, the [police] report says.

And if you're really into the Halloween thing, you can practice deception in words as well as appearance:

The police report offers a far different version of events from the brief account Curtis gave Monday to The Columbian, one that seems likely to threaten Curtis' political future.

But why pay attention to the biased, liberal Old Media? We all know that law enforcement & the military never lie, so let's look at the police report & the search warrant (Remember, the search warrant may have been signed by a liberal activist judge, so it must be taken w/ a grain of salt.)

You'd think Rep. Curtis could've just his worn his fire captain's suit for Halloween. Or borrowed some of Mrs. Curtis's clothes.

Curtis, 48, is married and has two daughters. The two-term legislator and retired fire department captain was in Spokane last week for a retreat with other Republican lawmakers in preparation for the 2008 Legislature.

Does the representative vote against gay rights every chance he gets? Need you even ask? Last question: Does the representative sport one of those big old macho fireman mustaches? You know, the kind often referred to as dick-dusters?Why yes he do! How'd you ever guess?

America: Sex & Death &...

A socio-cultural phenomenon. Perverted sexuality, Thanatos, Freud, psychobabble, etc.

Oh, and today is Halloween.

Shorter Joanie Zoidberg

Tuesday again, time to travel to the Tribune Co.'s toilet for felines & see what the Spawn of Lucianne has to offer.

The little feller has noticed that the vast majority of Americans (& sensible people throughout the civilized world) are not exactly enamored w/ conservative values & causes.

The trouble for conservatives [...] is that their worldview isn't overwhelmingly popular.

Can't fool him for more than two or three yrs., can you? None of this has anything to do w/ Bush of course:

Some conservatives respond to this dilemma with an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" shrug. If voters don't embrace limited government -- which really just means self-government -- then have them choose between a big government that does right-wing things and one that does left-wing things. Some of those people are called "compassionate conservatives." Others seek comfort in the soothing irrelevance of purism and adopt libertarian candidates and causes that will never, ever, win at the ballot box.

Out of idle curiosity, when was the last time the phrase "compassionate conservatism" issued from any one's mouth? It had pretty much gone the way of "I'm a uniter, not a divider," by February 2001, hadn't it?

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody -- when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

Oh, those stupid Americans, w/ their self-interest, their desire to pool their risk, & have the pool administered by the gov't. instead of a profit-crazed corporate insurer.

If Hillary Clinton promised to socialize medicine -- which, let the record show, she has attempted to do in the past -- she would lose. But her current campaign promise to simply expand coverage sounds reasonable enough -- even though there's no reason to think she'll stop pushing for a national single-payer healthcare system (a.k.a. socialized medicine).

Let the record show that Americans don't realize that limited gov't. "really just means self-government." They're handing over their right to govern themselves & live free for a chance at health care, or a retirement consisting of more than scavenging for recyclables & eating canned pet food. How short-sighted of them. There's neither liberty nor virtue there. (Warning: It's frighteningly easy to spew crap like that.)

At this point we were afraid Doughbob was headed into "This Is Why Democracy Isn't Such a Good Idea" territory, but he may be saving that one for next yr., after the election.

But there is another course for conservatives: Simply do what you can, where you can, including supporting the most conservative candidate who can win and succeed in office.
Meanwhile, writes Voegeli, it "makes sense for conservatives to attack liberalism where it is weakest, rather than where it is strongest." Unlike the utopianisms of the left, conservatism is defined by an understanding that this life can never be made perfect, so pry out what bricks you can, when you can, wherever they are loose.

And while you're prying out the loose bricks, drowning the baby or whatever colorful metaphor you like to use for destroying the remainder of our social/governmental structure, don't let that building fall on you. Not that a ton of self-inflicted bricks on your head would make you any more of a brain-damaged fool than you already are.

And here's the shorter version (Ha ha, made you wait): Fellow committed conservatives, we've fucked up royally with stupidity, recklessness, cronyism, corruption, hypocrisy & all the other traits we're so well known for. Now all we can do is hunker down, wait for the demonic forces of liberalism to pass, then stand up & make funny faces at them. Once they're completely out of earshot, we can go "Nyah nyah!!" at them too.

Stylistic Notes: Unless not having a style is considered a style in this post-modern era, Jonah's only stylistic trait is the use of the word "crowd" in a condescending manner. And he comes through again:

[A]narchists, Marxists, flat-Earthers and every other creedal crowd -- all think they're right.

Usually it's something along the lines of "the brie and sandals crowd."
Above: DoughBob has an idea for (yet) another subtitle.
Liberal Fascism Update: We noted previously that the subtitle had changed, & the publication date had been pushed back, though only by a week. Not the first time the release date had been moved back. And now the subtitle has changed again, to: "The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." Sen. Clinton & Whole Foods don't get to sue any more. Editor & Publisher reports that Amazon's page for the book was hacked recently as well:

Now someone--presumably not a fan--has hacked the book's entry at online bookseller amazon.com. Its current title -- at least momentarily at that site -- is "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from When I Got My Advance Until I Finally Hand in the Manuscript in 2011."

Not the first time that's been hacked, either.

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

Six marriages between the two of them. Note Rudy's flag lapel pin in wedding photo. Note tiara & expression on Princess Judi. That's happiness? (Click for a better look.)This isn't turning into an exclusively anti-Giuliani web log, but it's easy & fun to pick on him. Incredibly easy, because he's always up to something suspicious or sleazy or arrogant or you name it.
Latest? From the WaPo:

Ten months into his presidential bid, Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to work part time at the security consulting firm he promised to leave this past spring to focus on his pursuit of the Republican nomination.
Giuliani's continuing involvement with a firm catering to corporate clients makes him unique among Republican contenders. It also complicates the task of separating his firm's assets from his campaign spending.

Last year, the ex-mayor raked in $4 million from his security consulting firm & $11 million from speech & book fees. (Did he "write" a book? We hadn't noticed.) 9/11 certainly "changed everything" for some people, didn't it?

One concern among ethics experts is that Giuliani's continuing affiliation with the firm might create a public perception that clients with business that could be affected by a Giuliani presidency might hire the firm to curry favor.
The firm's past clients had many connections to government.
They include:
• Purdue Pharma, which resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into the security of its OxyContin painkiller with only a fine, with the Giuliani firm's help.
• A confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to help ensure that his company could do security consulting business with the federal government in the post-Sept. 11 period.
• The horse-racing industry, which hired Giuliani's firm to review the security of its betting systems after a wagering scandal shook public confidence.
• BioOne, a company that can do biological cleanups, such as its cleaning of a Florida media building after the 2001 anthrax attacks.
• Energy giant Entergy, which hired Giuliani's firm to help tighten its security.

Gov't. of , by & for the corporationspeople, just as the first Republican president said at Gettysburg, has not perished from the earth.

We might also point out that Barack Obama is the only "taken seriously by the media" candidate who isn't a multi-millionaire, though he seems to be getting there.

Lost Connection to Reality (Not Dial or DSL)

Those in the viewing audience who've not yet made the transition to post-literacy may be interested in the full text of Fareed Zakaria's response to Podperson Norman's "Bombs Away" essay & the other crap being spewed by the neo-crazies, rather than just the transcript of the two on the News Hour, where time factors & the limitations of verbal expression made the discussion less edifying than reasoned, edited composition.

This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon. The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. [...] Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on? [...] Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.) [...] Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. [...] One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers. [...] Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

The response from the blood-thirsty war-mongers (should they attempt to deal w/ facts) will, of course, be the tired refrain of: "9/11, 9/11! Everything changed after 9/11!!" Many people didn't buy that six yrs. ago, and fewer & fewer are going along w/ it now.

Bottom Five

C'mon! You'd turn her down? The Texas Terri of the New Millenium?
The "lads" @ Maxim picked the Five Unsexiest Women Alive. We should qualify that by adding: "In Show Bidness, Who Are Considered Sexy by Someone, Somewhere." Just Another Blog™ would allow any of the five to eat crackers or almost anything else in bed, as "sexy" is not determined by mere physicality. How much money do any of these gals have, & how much of the rent chez Bouffant would they be willing to pay? There's your sexuality!

Get real, Maxim. We'd like to know where your editorial staff would rank on the list of "Pathetic Jagoffs Who Type Big, But Whose Lives Are Devoted to Crummy Movies, Crummier Video Games & The Crummiest Music, Plus Voyeurism of Scantily Clad (But Still Clad) Women?"

More Bad News

Also in the bad musical news dep't.: Porter Wagoner, of the Nudie suit, pompadour, duets w/ Dolly Parton, & a syndicated telebision show that ran from 1960 through 1981 died yesterday, not much too young, like Lucky Dube, but @ 80, of lung cancer. No fun, but not senselessly violent like a carjacking.Are you looking at that jacket, or those...?
Funeral Thurs. @ the Grand Ole Opry.

Bad Fucking News

While checking out the Lindsay Roberts action @ Pissed On Politics we encountered this sad bit of news: South Afrikan reggae star Lucky Dube went to meet Jah in person as the result of a carjacking almost two wks. ago. Poor bastard had a three-month old daughter. This sucks like Peter Tosh's murder in a home invasion.

More Christian Wife Action

Speaking of Xtian (or at least Mormon) wives, as we were in the item just below, LEFT-OVER has a nice take on the Republican Wives Club. We're stealing their photo montage (Look @ Princess Giuliani, yikes!) but you should whip over & read their take on these ladies.We get the impression that if there's any Xtian Domestic Discipline going on w/ these power couples, the wives are not the ones wearing the crotchless pantaloons.

Most Popular Searches: Spanking & ORU

Viewers often ask, "M. Bouffant, Just Another Blog (From L. A.)™ covers so many different aspects of contemporary culture & politics, what is the most popular search to your wonderful blog?" Then they grow large leather bat-wings & fly away, but that's another story, which we're hoping medication will take care of. Other than the Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who seem to check in every half hour or so, and the CIA agents in Silicon Valley who do the same (Are they secretly communicating w/ each other through our devil-box? We'll have to check the times they're "reading" against each other.) the most common search we get is for Christian wife spanking (A/K/A Christian Domestic Discipline) based on this item we ran some time ago. We don't think many of the searchers are approaching it w/ the sense of humor we have about it. We also get hits for our screeds against Blackwater, and recently ones concerning the Oral Roberts U. scam. Pissed On Politics has several good links. It looks as if there is a second set of allegations. Here's the juiciest extract:

The report says that dead-bolt locks were installed on all bedroom doors at the Richard Roberts residence at the insistence of his oldest daughter. ''This was precipitated by Mrs. Roberts repeatedly moving into the home her 16 year old male 'friend,' which made her daughters uncomfortable.''

Damn. What is this world coming to when a parent doesn't have control of her own house anymore?

Risky Rudy

Niall Ferguson, colonialist & imperialist, had a column in the regional wrapper of fish in September about Rudy Giuliani, & how he would not be a good president. Ferguson is a historian, though of the right-wing revisionist type; one of his books, The Pity of War, suggests that Imperial Germany should have been allowed to win World War I, which would have lead to something similar to the current European Union, & Britain remaining an empire & the world's dominant financial power. Not much room for the U. S. in that scenario, but it gives an idea of how Mr. Ferguson approaches things. You might well imagine that the Mayor of 9/11 would be a favorite of Fergie's, but no. Ferguson seems to still have some connection to "liberally biased" reality. (Perhaps some more time @ the Hoover Institution, where he is a Senior Fellow, will disabuse him of that.) We quote:

...Giuliani buys the idea that since 9/11, the U.S. has been fighting World War III. You know how this routine goes. Al Qaeda is made up of Islamo-fascists; 9/11 was Pearl Harbor; Saddam Hussein was the Arab Hitler; the fall of Baghdad would be like the liberation of Paris. And so on. Now it's Giuliani's turn. "We should try to accomplish [in Iraq] what we accomplished in Japan or in Germany," he says. What, like bombing the place flat? The reality is that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism today is wholly different from the threat posed by the Axis powers in 1941-42. To judge by Osama bin Laden's latest rant, he aims at mass conversion, not conquest (with low-interest loans as the latest inducement). The Islamists have thousands rather than millions of trained warriors. Their most dangerous weapons are land mines and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, not aircraft carriers and guided missiles. The total number of American fatalities that can be attributed to this supposed world war is about 6,000 (adding together 9/11 victims with U.S. passports and the service personnel killed in action in Iraq). On average, the Axis powers killed about 20,000 Allied soldiers and civilians a day. The trouble is that the more Americans imagine they are in a world war, the less attention they pay to the more profound strategic threats their country faces. I can think of four in particular: • the descent of the greater Middle East into a large-scale war; • the disintegration of the system of nuclear nonproliferation; • the escalating competition between developed and emerging economies over scarce raw materials; • the breakdown of the system of multilateral trade liberalization. Taken together, these challenges will sorely test whoever occupies the White House after Bush. Has Giuliani given any of them serious thought? Does he have any strategic vision beyond preventing another 9/11 (his nightmare, he says, is an Iranian-made dirty bomb "in London or Rome or America")? Applied to cleaning up the mean streets of New York, Giuliani's offensive approach worked pretty well (though it eventually ended in overkill). How well it can work as foreign policy is another matter altogether.

And read the discussion from tonight's PBS News Hour w/ Norman "Nuke 'em All" Podhoretz, one of Giuliani's advisers, & Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International.

Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz wrote in June that military force was "required" to stop Iran from getting a bomb and offered this description of Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Quote, "Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism," end quote. Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria responded recently to Podhoretz, writing, "For this staggering proposition, Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence." And Zakaria wrote, "The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality." [...] JUDY WOODRUFF: ... I do want to ask you both, because I think it's important. Mr. Podhoretz, do you think that, as you wrote a few months ago, this administration, this president intends before he leaves office to strike Iran? NORMAN PODHORETZ: Yes, I do believe he will, because he has said many times -- or at least two times that I know of in public -- that, if we allow Iran to get the bomb, people 50 years from now will look back at us the way we look back at the men who made the Munich pact with Hitler in 1938 and say, "How could they have let this happen?" Well, unlike Fareed Zakaria and the foreign policy establishment that is complacent and irresponsible, in my opinion, I think the president recognizes the danger. I think he knows that time is short, that time is not on our side. And I think he will take military action, not an invasion, but air strikes before he leaves office. JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Fareed Zakaria, if you would, a brief response. FAREED ZAKARIA: Oh, I would doubt it. Look, in the early 1980s, Norman Podhoretz and the neoconservatives believed the Soviet Union was going to take over the world and Finlandize Europe. When Reagan started talking to the Soviets, started talking to Gorbachev, Mr. Podhoretz excoriated him, called it the "Reagan road to detente" and such. It turned out he was wrong. It turned out that the Soviets were not that powerful, and that history was on our side, and that things were going to work out as long as we kept our cool. I believe in just the way that we have deterred the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Kim Jong Il, history will prove that we can use deterrence and containment to contain the problem of Iran and that we do not need to launch a third unilateral invasion just to do that. JUDY WOODRUFF: Fareed Zakaria and Norman Podhoretz... NORMAN PODHORETZ: God help us if we follow that counsel.

Who'll help us if we attack yet another country, Norm? The 101st Keyboard Kommandos? The 82nd Chairborne? Space Elves?

Only in North America: Halloween

Halloween is a mostly American phenom, though our cultural cousins in Canada are unable to escape the gravitational pull. Above: Whistling past the graveyard in Los Feliz.

What does this say about us? We worship (that is, are scared shitless of) death. Our other big holiday? The excess of commerciality that is X-mess. We don't want to die, but we expect a reindeer herder to break into our house & leave stuff for us. (The exact opposite of regular human behavior.) How fucking stupid, childish & ignorant can one nation be? (Don't ask, you'll find out.)

What Would Jesus Do?

Left to right: The Ex-Mayor, The Dog Stapler, & The Molesting Monsignor, in Rome.
More on Rudy "The Catholic" Giuliani's close friend, the Molesting Monsignor, Alan Placa, from ABC News' The Blotter:

At a campaign appearance in Milwaukee last week, Giuliani continued to defend Placa, who he described to reporters as a close friend for 39 years.
"I know the man; I know who he is, so I support him," Giuliani said. "We give some of the worst people in our society the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt," he said. "And, of course, I'm going to give that to one of my closest friends."

Is the ex-mayor admitting that the Monsignor is one "of the worst people in our society?"

Appearing publicly for the first time today on ABC News' "Good Morning America," Tollner says the abuse started when he and Placa were in the high school making posters for a Right to Life march.
"As he started to explain how these posters should be done, I realized that something was rubbing my body," Tollner said. "After a minute or two, I realized that he's feeling me, feeling me in my genital area."

Well, you won't have to have any more "Right to Life" marches if you only have gay sex.

SPECIAL NOTE: This is our 500th item, & a nice vicious one, politically meaningful even. How nice that it wasn't a lame attempt @ humor, an excuse to show unclad women, or any of the other tripe so often found here. 500 in a bit less than six months. Not bad for an editorial staff w/ nothing else to do.

Freddie Thompson, Crusading Prosecutor & Boy Genius

Good ol' boy Freddie in the local cage-liner:

He was "attacking crime and public corruption," boasts a video played at his campaign events. During a candidate debate this month, Thompson said he spent those years "prosecuting most of the major federal crimes in middle Tennessee -- most of the major ones." But a review of the 88 criminal cases Thompson handled at the U.S. attorney's office in Nashville, from 1969 to 1972, reveals a different and more human portrait -- that of a young lawyer learning the ropes on routine cases involving gambling, mail theft and, in one instance, talking dirty on CB radio.

He's a liar, he's lazy, & Nixon didn't think highly of him:

In this May 1973 recording, he shared his concern with then-chief of staff Alexander Haig. "He's talking to Fred Thompson. I said you're not --," Haig begins. "Oh sh--, he's dumb as hell. Fred Thompson," Nixon interjects. "Who is he? He won't say anything." [...] In his memoir of the Watergate era, Thompson admits to secretly alerting the White House to key evidence as it was discovered by congressional investigators. Former Watergate committee investigator Scott Armstrong told ABC News that Thompson's cooperation with the White House undermined the investigation.

Of course, he has as much of a chance at the Republican nomination as Ron Paul does. Too bad, as either one would be a worthy opponent. For Lyndon Johnson.

Things We Missed When the Internet Was Away

We missed this anyway, as the DSL didn't go away until several days after 6 October, but the 80th anniv. of talkies came & went. Get a fuller story from Susan King in the regional fishwrapper. (George Jessel, who'd played in the non-musical Broadway version, wanted $10,000 more than Warner Bros. offered, because he "wasn't getting paid to sing.") So the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, featured Al Jolson in blackface, instead of the Toastmaster General:And the first classic (silent division) of the American art form? You got it, Birth of a Nation. The real question should be, "Why doesn't everybody hate us?"