Jackson Browne and John Hall / Possible Congressional Condemning of Rush Limbaugh

Left to Right: John Hall, Jackson Browne, John Amato, Lucas Gardner, Howie Klein

Just got back from a fantastic show/fund raiser at Rob Light's house in Encino. The fund raiser was for John Hall, and the show was by Jackson Browne. John also spent a good deal of time on stage with Jackson and they had a great, great set. Mr. Browne's vocals sounded particularly good; he has an amazing head voice.
Before the show, John Amato (from Crooks&Liars), Howie Klein (from downwithtyranny) and I got to have a chat with John Hall where we talked primarily about the infamous moveon.org ad. Congressman Hall had voted to condemn the ad, which seemed incongruous with his otherwise stellar voting record. During our talk, he defended his positioned and gave us further clarification beyond "yay" and "nay".

The Moveon.org ad, he said, was counter-productive to the Democrat's cause. The controversial headline of the ad distracted people from the valid points laid out in the paragraph below, Hall thought. Furthermore, he believes it gave the Republicans fodder for their ridiculous party line that Democrats don't support the troops (which is funny, because we were pushing to give them more time off).

Hall also pointed out that he is pushing forward a bill to condemn Rush Limbaugh for calling two, now-deceased soldiers "phony soldiers". I believe that condemning Rush would be a fantastic idea. My father listens to him and thusly I grew up listening to him, too. Rush is a fat, slobbering, hypocrite. When I was in the Dominican Republic it was well-known "secret" that Mr. Limbaugh came to Santo Domingo to have sex with people of a "younger disposition". It makes sense that he's deaf in one ear from codeine abuse - if he had two functioning ears he would kill himself if he could hear all of the shit that comes out of his mouth (one can only hope for giant strides forward in hearing restoration). But I digress.

Though the motion to condemn Rush is fantastic, one has to wonder what exactly it accomplishes except a congressional "slap on the wrist". When Howie asked Congressman Hall if voting on bills to condemn people's actions was a good use of congressional time, Hall replied "Probably not". I happen to agree with him. I also agree that the moveon.org ad gave the Republicans fodder for the endless white noise that they spew instead than talking about substantial issues.

But here's a question: If Congress condemns moveon.org for an advertisement, and they may condemn Rush Limbaugh for something he said, then why not publicly condemn Blackwater Security for killing civilians and allegedly smuggling guns?

Left to Right: Jackson Browne, John Amato, and Lucas Gardner (photo by Howie Klein)

Saturday Night Fun With Stats

Since I am a complete waste of space and have nothing to do on a Saturday night other than read articles, I am doing a roundup of stats that I found entertaining.

1. Faith in the Federal Government is now at Watergate levels. A new Gallup poll shows that people's confidence in the executive branch is at 43%. Nixon's lowest was 40%. This shows that, if you rape people of their rights, run the country into debt and kill off soldiers without much reason, it will take Americans six years to notice there's a problem. Today I left my laundry in the washer for seven hours, so I guess I can't say I'm any better.

2. The divorce rate in America is at its lowest level since the 70s. So why do people think that marriage is dying? Maybe it's because social conservatives want people to think that marriage is too fragile to withstand gays getting married. Because if two dudes filed their taxes together and got on the same insurance plan then things would really start turning to shit.
Isn't it kind of strange how when people talk about marriage, it seems like they're talking about a human? Marriage is fragile, we don't want to violate it. I picture athropomorphized marriage as a little girl wearing a white sun dress, running through a field of wheat? Then, as she makes her way across a small dell, she comes upon two men having intercourse behind a barn. Marriage then grows up to be a prostitute and dies because she mixed heroin and cocaine.

3. Republican voters have heads filled with cotton candy. Sweet, sweet cotton candy. Seriously, how the hell can you want Mitt Romney to be our president? The man is beyond detestable. He said helping him become president was as much a service to our country as being US soldier. Giving your life vs. helping Mitt Romney. I, personally, would chug a beaker of sulfuric acid than spend 10 minutes with Romney.
And how the hell can Giuliani be number two? Look at the shit this guy tries to pull. Of course he blames it on the one thing his campaign is built around: 9/11. Huuuuge surprise.

What the Hell...

You know what's great?
Debt.
Lots and lots of debt.

We all know that the American people love debt. Which is why the Senate, in their infinite and uncorrupted wisdom, increased the federal debt limit from $8.9 trillion to $9.8 trillion (they thought that if they switched the numbers around then no one would notice).
This is the 5th time they've had to do it since Bush has been in office. They've increased the debt limit nearly $4 trillion dollars (which is worth more than all the tea in China, for those curious).

Lets do some math:
The debt limit now $9.8 trillion. If they've increased it by nearly $4 trillion, then they've almost doubled the federal debt limit in eight years.

Why did they do this? Maybe because everyone knows that Bush is asking for $190 billion dollars for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Afghan war is going so well that Osama may have escaped U.S. forces... MAY have... apparently our intelligence isn't good enough to know a flying fuck about the most notorious man in the world.

This is an amazing way for a country to work. If the government finds themselves unable to get more money because of a limit imposed, they just change the limit. The same idea works for laws, I'm sure.

Now, here's an interesting thing about the vote:
The votes came out to be 94 for and 1 against (thanks Russ Feingold, it was a noble effort). There were 5 missing senators - all of them running for president. Clinton, Obama, Biden, McCain, and Brownback.
This is because there is no good way to vote for this gap-widening for the war money.
If they vote against it, they look like they're not supporting the troops (which is a bullshit phrase, by the way).
If they vote for it, they look like a bunch of fucking idiots. Which is why they took the typical politician's route out of it and acted like the problem wasn't there.

What is Happening to America?

Last year, around this time, I was in the Dominican Republic working at a hospital that ran off of donations. During the time I was there a few major contributers visited the hospital to check up on things. I ended up spending some time with a few of these people, and got to talk to them about something other than how hot it was all the time.
One of these people, who I'll call John, was a 60-something man from the Northeast. While spending a weekend on the beach John noticed that I was reading America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama, and he asked me what it was about. I told him it was about Neo-Conservatism, and proceeded to tell him why it's so loathsome, and why it's killing America.
John disagreed with me.
John said that what is killing America wasn't the infringement of civil rights, the corrupt officials, the never-ending wars, the over-spending on said wars, the poor foreign policy, or the light-speed progress towards a dictatorship. None of that.
John said that what is killing America was homosexuals.

I laughed. I asked him why he thought that.
"Because that's what happened to Rome," he answered.
Wow. I thought what brought the fall of Rome was political instability and constant agitation from groups like the Gauls. If anal sex can topple one of history's greatest civilizations then humanity deserves extinction.

It was because of this conversation with John that I finally realized what is killing the United States.
It's us.
We can blame our officials and blame our media and blame our education, but we are the root of all of those problems. Because those officials must be elected, that news must be written, and those children must be taught - all of this must be done by Americans.
Something happened a few years ago and there were promises all over the country that "Things would never be the same." America did change - it went to sleep.

I don't even know where to push for change. We live in a nation where this kind of shit makes sense to people. We live in a nation where people want there to be theocratic law. We live in a nation where people willingly have RFID chips implanted in them. We live in a nation where the eye of the government is so omniscient that you could use it to stalk your ex-girlfriend. We live in a nation where this man was elected - twice.

America was founded as nation where man would make the law. Where you weren't bound by your heritage. Where anything could be earned. Where you could be born a pauper but die a prince. And it is that idea that is so fragile in a very certain way. Because that idea can't be killed by a tyrant, terrorist, or invader.
But it can be forgotten; and that is the greatest danger facing America today.

Blackwater Will Kill You Dead (and Get Paid)

There's this American mentality that something you pay for has to be better than something you get for free. This is probably rooted in the fact that the US Government screws up nearly everything it touches, for the most part.
You've probably heard recently that Blackwater got suspended from ground operations in Iraq for killing eight Iraqi civilians.
Well, they're not suspended anymore.
Blackwater was suspended, in total, for four days. Which equals out to be a half day for each civillian killed. So if you're Iraqi you should know that your death isn't worth a full 24 hours, just a petty 12. And if you're a mercenary in Iraq, you'll only get suspended for 12 hours for every Iraqi killed (so if you want a week off, then kill ten Iraqis).

Blackwater apparently has been a problem in Iraq for a while, notably as a figure of hate for Iraqi civillians. One of downwithtyranny's neighbors works in Iraq and he refuses to use Blackwater security. This makes sense, seeing as the mercenaries are probably more of a target than the people they're hired to protect.

Despite the fact that they're known to have bad relations with Iraqis, our own Congress has nearly no idea what these people are up to.

We know virtually nothing about them. We think about forty cents of every dollar goes to private military contractors, we think about 800 of them have been killed in Iraq, but we don't know that - they're not even counted. And we think that there are 25 thousand to 40 thousand engaged in combat-related activities - but we don't know and we can't find out.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) House Intelligence Committee

Why is it so damn hard to find out anything about Blackwater? I'm sure it was nothing to do with the fact that Erik Prince is a major Republican contributor and Cofer Black was a counter terrorism official with the Bush administration in 2001. Because politicians never, ever hand out favors in exchange for money.

Shit.

We all knew this would happen. It's been like the big pink elephant in the room. Wait, it's been more like ten huge pink elephants with guns and top hats.
The exchange rate is now 1 to 1.0012 between the US dollar and Canadian dollar, respectively.
Isn't that great. Just now, while I was writing this, it's gone down to 1.0010.

We've done it, America. We're now on par with Junior Varsity America. In a few weeks the Canadian dollar will surpass ours and our towns will be overrun by the mounties and maple syrup will rain from the skies while poutine erupts from the ground.
I, for one, welcome our new amusingly-accented overlords. The prospect of Canadian bacon and french fries drenched in cheese and gravy might not sound that good, but this might help me learn French a bit quicker.

The Saudis have stopped using the dollar, the Euro is completely owning us, and the US Treasury is about to reach its debt limit. Oh, and the housing market will continue to suck for a while. This is awesome. Who wants a good economy? If you want a good economy you're anti-American.

Really, this doesn't have anything to do with the billions-a-week war that we're waging. It's no wonder Bush opposed expanding children's health care.
War vs. Saving Children. It's an easy decision because war is so much cooler. There's explosions and guns. Children are just the future of humanity. Yawn.

Colin Powell: "Terrorists are Not Our Greatest Threat"

I get the feeling that Colin Powell would tell you how much he hated the Bush administration if you got a few beers into him. Maybe GQ got him drunk when they took this incredibly creepy picture of his face for their piece.
Jesus Christ, he looks like one of those homeless guys who have two-sided arguments with parking meters.
Drunk or not, he managed to say something smart:

"What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

What's he saying there? Basically that we can't let Bush take away our privacy, civil liberties and... uh... what's that other thing... oh yeah, our constitution. But that thing is over 200 years old, so no one gives a fuck about it anymore. Right? He also says something else smart that would piss off most Republicans:

"America could not survive without immigration," he says. "Even the undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economy. That's the country my parents came to. That's the image we have to portray to the rest of the world: kind, generous, a nation of nations, touched by every nation, and we touch every nation in return."

Holy shit. Did he just say that America should fool around with the rest of the world? I'm pretty sure that Australia has the clap, but Sweden's looking pretty nice up there.
He makes a good point that America is now a nation of immigrants (since we fucking laid waste to the native population, setting the tone for the next few hundred years...).

We shouldn't forget that without immigration, and the prompt massacre of anyone already here, America wouldn't be the country that it is today; drunk with power, wandering into other countries and blathering on about how Canada used to be so much cooler, and how Britain was always down to party, before passing out somewhere around the Falklands, promptly starting another war.

But the threat of Bush chipping away the very existence of what makes this a free country is so real that it's becoming very, very scary. On October 1st, there's a new branch of Homeland Security that will be spying on you called The National Applications Office. So we'll officially have a telescope pointing inwards, to our own country.

Why is the government doing this? Because there are two things that gives Bush sustenance: Taking away the civil liberties of Americans, and eating the still-beating heart of a kitten.
And he's fresh out of kittens.