I can’t get this song out of my head. And I’m not even entirely sure that I like it.

(Fig 1-A: The Identity Thief)

Recently everyone who works for my massive, sprawling employer had to complete a “security module”, which was basically a very long, drawn-out film-strip like from grade school, but on a browser instead of projected on to a movie screen, and it was about the importance of password protection and not sharing your sensitive information with other people, blah, blah, blah.  The illustration above is an artistic representation of an “Identity Thief”, who obviously wears a full ninja mask to conceal his identity while he steals your social security number.  But he also wears a questionably coordinated business casual dress-shirt and tie combo while he does it, because, you know, what is he, a farmer?

I did not care much for that speech tonight, no I did not.  It called to mind the interview I heard on “All Things Considered” yesterday with ex-Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.  It made me feel literally nauseated to hear those creaky old BushCo talking points being spat forth on to the airwaves once again, like the unflushable turds that gaily circle in the bowl of a clogged toilet.

Gerson said our allies need to be reassured that we won’t “cut and run” (cringe!), that this will be the emergence of Obama as a “war-time president” (shudder!) and I had hoped, hoped, hoped that this was not the truly awful, mediocre Shape of the Speech to Come and yet, there it was, tonight, a speech that (if you took out all the words with more than three syllables, dropped in several howling malapropisms, and set it to the tune of “When You Wish Upon a Star”) could have been given by George Bush.

Look at this from HuffPo:

Karl Rove On Obama Plan: ‘Stand Up And Applaud’

This has to be some kind of trick.

Or not, I dunno.  I don’t even know what to think anymore.  Every other liberal blogger on the planet is howling and bellowing through their “CAPS LOCK” keys about this right now and I don’t know what I’m supposed to add to that.

Do you remember back in 2002 when we first invaded Afghanistan and, like, Aaron Brown on CNN and those guys were playing clips of what was, I guess, like the national sport that had been outlawed under the Taliban, sort of Afghani polo, where they rode around on horses, fighting over the headless carcass of a goat?  I remember thinking at the time, “Oh, great, these people are going to make fantastic friends and allies.  I’m so glad we’ve, uh, ‘liberated’ them.”

And now it turns out that with our help, Afghanistan has become the rapey-est place on earth:

KABUL (Reuters) - Rape in Afghanistan is under-reported, concealed and a human rights problem of “profound proportions,” the United Nations said on Monday.

Norah Niland, the United Nations’ human rights representative in Afghanistan, said field research conducted late last year and early this year found rape affected all parts of Afghanistan, across all communities and social groups.

“Women and girls are at risk of rape in their homes, in their villages and in detention facilities,” Niland said at a news conference in Kabul, as part of a 16-day activism campaign against gender violence.

“It is a human rights problem of profound proportions.”

This is what nine years and billions of dollars of American aid buys you, whoo-hoo.  Yay, us.  Who knew that those pervy embassy guards were simply going native?

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

Above is a pretty funny video about the GOP digging up the corpse of Ronald Reagan and reanimating it.  It becomes less funny and more sad when you realize that if they actually could manage that, they absolutely would.  Never mind that anyone who’s paying attention knows that Uncle Ronnie was actually an awful president, a bumbling nincompoop whose handlers began the now time-honored pattern of Republicans sacking the government, bankrupting the national coffers, and leaving a trail of dead for a Democrat to come into office and mop up later.

But of course you’d never know that watching the usual parade of cable news stooges, “Democrats” and Republicans who they pull from their formaldehyde-filled tanks each week and prop up for a few hours on the Sunday talk shows.  Nobody ever questions the notion that Reagan was some kind of All-American avatar of grace, strength, and purity, never mind the fact that he was an empty-headed B-movie actor who never had an original thought in his life.

See, Reagan was lucky enough to have the last pre-Information Age presidency.  The bulk of his dirty tricks and policy failures remain mostly under the radar of the American public.  Can you imagine the fun that TPM would have had with Fawn Hall and her paper shredder?

But of course, there’s a whole Reich Wing cottage industry devoted to the preservation of the Legend of St. Ronnie and apparently their high priestess is Peggy “Thousand Points of Shite” Noonan, whom the RNC has clearly agreed to keep in Liquid Valium spritzers and Hermes bags forever and ever, cos she’s still out there spewing rancid pabulum like this:

It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through ‘08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you’re stupid doesn’t mean you’re Lincoln.

One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we’ve got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don’t worry.

But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

Oh, give me a break you old delusional hag.  CAN you get to the end of a column without burying that painstakingly surgeried mug of yours in the cold, rotting taint of Dead Ronnie?  Pathetic.  Let it go, woman.  Even his son and namesake doesn’t vote Republican anymore.

God, is there any more morbid, obsessive relationship than Conservatives and their panoply of hopeless illusions?  Kind of makes you sick, doesn’t it?

This is what you get,
This is what you get,
This is what you get,
When you mess with us.

I wish I had these guys’ agenda.

(From the front page of Huffington Post.)

Do you hear that you guys?  Leave Rachel ALONE.  Please!  She’s just trying to live her life in peace!  Did you get her good side?  No, the RIGHT side, you jackals! No, no, she always bends over like a stripper who just spotted a fifty when she’s opening a car door.  Make sure you get good shots of the Cavali shades, fellas, so she can write them off on her taxes.

Remember Patsy Stone’s run-in with the gutter press? “MP in Drug-Crazed Sex Romp Shock With Fash Mag Slag!”

Guys, guys, give her a break.

I’m so excited about the fact that this story is going to be sucking up all the air in the media bubble for the next six months.  I’m starting the countdown clock now until Chris Matthews compares Tiger Woods to President Obama as a means of suggesting that the administration is in decline after its promising early showing.  But then immediately denies that the comparison had ANYTHING TO DO WITH RACE OH MY GOD.  Tick tock, Tweety.  Lord knows the world sets its watch by the thrills that run up your scrawny old man leg.

Don’t worry, kids, I’ve just been doing some stuff away from the computer, spending time with some Real World friends.  I’ll be back shortly.

In the meantime, have some vintage Eurythmics.  Open thread!

I think we may have found something even more destined for failure than President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.

ATHENS, Ga. — An animal rights organization says the use of a live bulldog mascot contributes to the breed’s health problems and wants the University of Georgia to consider an alternative.

PETA suggests Georgia could use a robot dog or a costumed mascot instead of the white English bulldogs that have represented the school at football games since 1956.

Dude, I can’t think of a single constituency less likely to get traction with Georgia Footbawl fans than PETA.  I mean, I’m a total bleeding heart liberal commie and I think PETA are a bunch of holier-than-thou publicity whores who would do the world and all its animals a huge favor by eating a bag of lightly salted rat dicks and dying en masse.  This whole idea of theirs is made of total FAIL.

Shit, I hope they come to Athens and try protesting at a UGA game.  That would be awesome.  They’d be someone’s new hood ornament before you can say, “Vegetarians taste just like chicken!”

Ok, gang, scoot back that chair from the table, fix yourself a big cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, and crank this song and dance around the room. You’ll thank me later.

I’m so full.  I feel like a snake that swallowed an elephant.

Here I am, kids, at my mom’s house.  My friend Erin is watching the kittehs and house-sitting for me back in Athens, and I’m sitting here with Mom, Tom (my step-dad), and my grandpa, watching “Glee”.  Tomorrow we’re going to do the full meal with all the trimmings, but for now it’s just quiet, our tummies are full, there’s a pot of coffee on, and it’s the Holiday, almost.  It’s not quite as great as it’ll be at Christmas when PaTRex and my sister in law Lisa Rex will be here (They’re in Indiana with her folks for Thanksgiving.), but it’s pretty awesome.

We don’t have a lot of traditions for Thanksgiving in my family besides eating turkey and dressing and mac and cheese until we can barely move and then collapsing into tryptophan-induced comas (we do call that sleep-inducing chemical in turkey “Turk-o-meene”).  There’s no hiding Uncle Lou’s toupee in the light fixture, no contests to see who can fit the most satsumas into their mouth.

Oh!  But there is the dressing.  It’s my grandmother’s recipe.  You take the Pepperidge Farm herb stuffing and mix it with an egg and some chicken broth and form it into little cookie-shapes and bake it on a greased sheet pan until the edges are brown and crispy.  They’re sooooo good.  I’ve never had dressing this way anywhere but home and, frankly, all other forms of dressing?  A disappointment.  For me it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving (or Christmas or Easter or my birthday) without it.

What about you guys?  What are your Thanksgiving traditions?

It’s a travel day for me, so posting will be light.

You kids talk amongst yourselves. I’ll be back in the evening.

Cenk Uygur’s internet talk show “The Young Turks”, who, by the way, were cool enough to feature me as a guest once, gets more viewers each day than MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.

Uygur doesn’t look like a rebel, but there is something revolutionary going on here. Roughly 450,000 people watch The Young Turks on YouTube alone; thousands more in the precious 18-to-35 demo listen on Sirius Satellite Radio and through the TYT Web site, making it competitive with, say, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (382,000 viewers a day in September), or CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight (616,000). And that, says Uygur, is only the beginning of a campaign “to take down television.”

Somebody’s got to do it.  I mean, David Gregory?  Really?

Oh, Tucker, what is this mythical world you’ve dreamed up inside your empty little head?

Crooks and Liars: When asked about how people feel about quitter Sarah-Barracuda, Tucker pulled out the tired old McCain campaign rhetoric about how President Obama is “less experienced” than Palin even though he thinks there should be “more respect for the office” than to want to elect either one of them. Tucker added that he believes Palin is smarter than Al Gore, and just thinks its “weird” that anyone would be terrified of her and afraid that she might actually have a chance of being elected President.

Tucker, it’s amazing how you’re only just now 40 and yet you’re already a relic, a bit of unemployed cable TV detritus washed up on the polluted shores of Pox News and the less-watched spillways of C-SPAN.  What last few wisps of credibility Jon Stewart was gracious enough to let you walk away with after he performed a back-alley abortion on your career, you traded in for a pumpkin-colored frilly pirate shirt, sequins, and a jerky, wooden-limbed three-episode run on “Dancing With the Stars”.

Honestly, that should have finished you off for good.  And yet here you are again, like Alex P. Keaton gone soft and bitter in middle age, Granpa George Will’s lost nephew, rattling your tin cup on whatever cable shows will have you and spewing reheated talking points out of your swollen Moon Pie of a face that have the distinctly bleary, delusional aftertaste of the early second term of George W. Bush.  It’s over, Tucker.  Go home and lay on the deep, plushy cushions of your mother’s frozen food fortune and leave us working folks alone, okay?  Thanks.

I *love* this song. Where was I when it was new?

Gov. MILF’s been lolling around on bear skin rugs with biker dudes, we hear, and that’s got some of the Rich Lowry types out there not sitting up quite so straight on their couches anymore.

Alex Conant: Coming soon to a cable TV station near you: TLC just released a YouTube video of a recent interview with Sarah Palin that has an unfortunate image of the Governor relaxing on a bear rug in her office. Seriously:

There’s video if you’re feeling particularly squick-proof, although I think it’s more of a bear-skin couch kind of deal, but apparently such niceties do not matter to Mr. Conant, who is packing up his bottle of Jergen’s and box of Kleenex and going to bed.

I’ve defended Sarah Palin after recent media criticism. But I fear this latest video, coming just a few months after the unfortunate turkey-slaughter clip, is fodder for cable TV and her opponents.

I know!  Yay.

I seem to remember at one point joking that Alaska under Sarah Palin was a place where it was always winter and never Christmas.  Boy, was I wrong.  It’s Christmas every day with that woman, praise Bast.  What with the trailer-trash bail-jumping mother-in-law and other delightful family antics, the legal defense fund that ran aground on ethical issues literally within hours of its creation, and on and on and on.  Thank you, Sarah Palin, for just being you.  You’re special.

But it sounds like the rest of the GOP might have to wash its hair next year, Governor, k?  We’ll call you.

Yeah, and the Michele Bachmann thing isn’t working out so well either.

With Rep. Michele Bachmann’s false assertion that a Democrats held the White House when the last “swine flu” scare fresh in mind, the editorial board of the West Central Tribune conjures another agricultural affliction when discussing the 6th District Republican: “foot-in-mouth disease.” Citing her recent gaffes — many of which we’ve chronicled here — the editorial concludes: “Bachmann has become the poster child for bizarre politicians. She also is an embarrassment to both the 6th District and Minnesota.”

But never fear, if there’s one thing that the Right will always find, it’s someone new to worship and uncritically adore, and right now it’s beauty pageant runner-up Carrie Prejean, who, when asked about her views on gay marriage by some screechy trainwreck whose name escapes me, said:

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don’t have gay marriages and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South California and, uh, the Iowa, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our marriages over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help marriage and should help the Iowans and the opposite marriage countries, so we will be able to build up our future…

Poor thing.  She’s not so great with the thinking and the talking, but she has a face like the front end of a platinum Mercedes SLR 722 and a lovely pair of breasts that she got between the Miss California and Miss America pageants and the folks at NOM just love her.  She’s shiny.

Dodai: Well, some people are psyched that Miss California USA Carrie Prejean is against same-sex marriage. Who? The people behind he National Organization for Marriage. They’ve put her in their brand-spanking new ad:

Politico’s Ben Smith notes that NOM paints the scenario as Miss California being “immediately attacked.” OMG who would attack a pretty, pretty beauty queen? A bitchy gay blogger, that’s who. (Dennis Miller says she was asked harder questions than President Obama fields.)

*snort!*  Dennis Miller?  That washout just wants to slip a fifty into her bikini strap, thankyewverymuch.

But really, can’t our side get a better spokesperson for ourselves than Perez Hilton, please?  Like, STAT?

(above: crapitalist pigs)

Litbrit has an excellent (if appalling) post up about the deplorable, disgusting conditions at the Smithfield Farms facility in La Gloria, Mexico where it is believed that the Swine Flu outbreak may have begun.

However, Smithfield’s statement fails to mention that countless residents of La Gloria were routinely and relentlessly exposed to airborne droplets of pig feces and decayed tissue for an undetermined number of years, thanks to toxic and sick-making clouds blowing outward from Granja Carrol’s so-called “oxidation ponds”–or pig sewage lagoons. And that they have long complained of respiratory illnesses, well before their children started dying in March.

Smithfield is, of course, another American company that has quietly taken its operations outside national borders in order to escape the jurisdiction of US Environmental and Work Safety laws.  Down there, they can pay off officials and operate a literal charnel house so filthy that it is apparently actually breeding lethal, mutant microorganisms.  Beyond the reach of US law in La Gloria, Smithfield never has to clean up after themselves or pay a decent wage to anyone or provide health care for anyone made sick by their operation.

This is the world that Tea Partiers and Libertarians say they want to live in, by the bye, the unregulated, untaxed, free-market world where accountability is only for the poor sons of bitches that can’t buy their way around the laws, i.e., the world we allegedly left behind in the 19th century.  What they call “socialism”, we call Civilization.  Is there any single hallmark of advanced societies that “conservatives” don’t want to erase and destroy?

“Capitalism” as it has been practiced under the Republican presidencies of Bush, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton, has basically been money-driven anarchy.  As the people now known as “Liberals” have frantically been trying to support the pillars of civilization; dignity, justice, peace, education, responsibility, etc., the howling brats of the Right have been trying to kick them away, insisting that all laws that conflict with their self-interest are unfair and the work of America-hating Bolsheviks who want to take away their stuff.  It’s disgusting.

Of course, maybe now that enough people have been kicked in the face by the system as it stands and “capitalism” per se is only polling slightly above genital warts with the American public, we may be able to bring back some of the things that made this country great before the Reagan Era began the Great American Decline.  Maybe.  Okay, not really.  But maybe we can slow down the collapse long enough to finish our days with lights that turn on and off and clean water.

Meanwhile, I agree with Robert Sietsema that we should call this the Smithfield™ Flu.  Or Smithfield™ H1N1, which sounds kind of like some old swing tune.

(above: a recycled white elephant that isn’t in the Senate)

I guess we’re supposed to be pleased that Old Man Arlen “Walking Waffle” Specter has seen the hand write in fire across the wall that his chances of being elected as a Republican in Pennsylvania are about nil, so he’s sought refuge on the other side of the aisle.  Well, don’t get too comfortable, dickhead.  I’ve got high hopes for the Democratic primaries next year.*  This eleventh hour change of heart in no way obviates all the times over the years where you would, sure, have occasionally lucid moments in the Senate and talk sense against the Bushes or whatever, but then cave in and vote with the Cro Magnon Caucus when it counted the most.

This is my one wish, y’all.  If I could rub a magic lamp and summon a genie, I would close my eyes, click my heels together three times, and say, “Term limits in the House and Senate!”  Honestly, the Senate is the closest thing that the United States has to a 13th century aristocracy, hence that leathery washout Norm Coleman’s desperate, desperate refusal to just let go.  Being a Senator in its way is like being a pharaoh.  People hold doors for you.  They defer to you.  You can park your car in the handicapped spots.

It’s time for that to come to an end.  No more mossy old geezers pulling their sad little old man puds and lining their pockets with our money as they enable massive corporations to rape our bank accounts and the national treasury.  No more John McCains.  No more Jack Murthas.  No more Ted Stevenses.  OUT, robber barons!  OUT, corrupt old fossils!

But anyway, yeah, we’ve got Arlen Specter, oh boy.  Really the only genuine pleasure I take in this is as Atrios says:

On the plus side, Senate staffers inform me that Republicans in the Senate are visibly in agony right now. So at least we have that!

Ah yes there is that.  What sweet, sweet music are their cries of pain.

*Even as I type and re-read that, with a sinking feeling, I kind of realize that I don’t have particularly high hopes for that process.  The DC Incumbent Protection Racket will undoubtedly see Specter as a known quantity and circle the wagons to protect him.  Oh, don’t you know Arlen?  He’s a great guy.  One of Us.  Democrat or Republican, he’s a company man, a real pukka sahib.

Yeah.

(totes awesome image from here)

So…what?  Are we all going to keel over dead today?

Who could have predicted that this thing would take on a whole new howlingly stupid life of its own on Twitter?  Apparently 124 characters is just enough to turn yourself and everyone around you into a complete raving idiot.  No wonder Republicans love the Twitmosphere.  It is apparently where thoughts go to die.