And now: a letter, a hotel registration book, and a series of photographs, which could add up to divorce, premature retirement, and possible criminal proceedings for a company director in Bromsgrove.  He’s a freemason, and a conservative M.P., so that’s 3,000 pounds please Mr. S… thank you… to stop us from revealing:
Your name
The name of the three other people involved,
The youth organization to which they belonged,
and The shop where you bought the equipment!

Blackmail! from Monty Python’s Flying Circus

OK, So Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in the Senate knew about the torture going back to 2002. The CIA’s making a point of leaking that information so we know about this. Can I ask a question?

What could Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats have done back when Bush was in charge?

» Continue reading “The Point of Bushie and CIA Briefing Congress on Torture: Blackmail.”

“The Republicans are fascists!” “The Democrats are fascists!” “Barack Obama’s a fascist!” “Newt Gingrich is a fascist!” Fascism is probably one of the most overused pejoratives in politics, and most who use it don’t know its true meaning. You want to know what real fascism is? The actual academic definition? I just read David Neiwert’s new book The Eliminationists, and that book brought up probably the best actual definition of what fascism is.

» Continue reading “Just what the hell is fascism anyways?”

Let’s face it.  The teabaggers Just Don’t Get It.  Right now, the Founding Fathers are all facepalming in their graves.  And they’ve never heard of the double-entendres and sexual references that have us snickering today.  And I’m not even addressing the racism or fascism or any of the other half-baked right-wing nonsense we’re seeing at today’s Teabaggings.

So let’s go over junior high school history again…

» Continue reading “You can’t have a real tea party without property damage!”

OK, I get it.  Letting these nests of vipers collapse under their own weight just isn’t a viable option.  They’re too big to fail.  Letting them go bankrupt would be like crossing the streams and result in total protonic reversal.  I understand that.  But at the same time, is it really too much to ask that all that free money that we, the taxpayers, are giving them come with some strings attached?

To be specific, I want three conditions in exchange for the bailout money.

» Continue reading “Three conditions I want in exchange for the bank, AIG and other bailouts…”

I don’t always do a Democratic Milquetoast every week.  Partially this is because there isn’t always a good candidate, but mostly, it’s because I’m lazy.  At any rate, this week, my winner isn’t even a Democrat.  He’s RNC Chairman Michael Steele!  His utter spinelessness early this week while sparring with right-wing hate jock Rush Limbaugh demands that I award him with the Milquetoast award – it was that epic!

» Continue reading “Not-So-Democratic Milquetoast of the Week: Michael Steele”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I made this like Mister Jindal photochop.  Call it another one of my minor talents that I’ve cultivated from time to time.  I figure that if Bobby Jindal is going to speak to the nation as if we’re four years old, I’ll compare him to another figure on TV that talks like that (except Mr. Rogers’ intended audience actually was four-year-olds.)

Won't you be my neighbor, Mister Jindal?

Let me tell you a secret.  I wasn’t always as liberal as I am today.  I used to be a libertarian, and I used to vote for Republicans at least as often as I voted for Democrats.  Now I won’t vote for a Republican for dog catcher.  What happened.  What drove me away from the GOP?

» Continue reading “Mr. Jindal’s Neighborhood: What’s gone wrong with the GOP?”

There’s speech you disagree with.  There’s speech you find distasteful, disrespectful, obnoxious.  Everybody finds something out there that they find offensive.  But you get used to it.  On the Internet in particular, there’s little to shelter you from those with sharp tongues, so you grow a thick skin.

And then, just when you think you’re too jaded to take offense at anything anymore, there’s this…

There are just so many things that are wrong with this cartoon.  There’s the flagrant racism.  There’s the veiled call to violence – specifically, a veiled call to assassinate the President of the United States.  What’s most disgusting is that so many people, including influential people in the media and government, think this should be a legitimate part of American discourse, and think we should “go there” all the time.

Let me add to the chorus of Americans who are saying WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!!!

New York Post, Sean Delonas, and Rupert Murdoch, you’ve taken vileness to the next level.  This is despicable.

It’s done.  The House and the Senate approved the final version of the stimulus bill, and it’s off to the White House.  President Obama is going to sign it into law on Tuesday, in my stomping grounds, Denver, CO, in the Museum of Nature and Science.

I’ve been wanting to do a postmortem on this first big piece of legislation that came since President Obama took office.  Let’s first take a look at some problems with the bill itself.

» Continue reading “Economic Stimulus Bill postmortem.”

OK, if we take the version of the Great Depression currently being shilled by Mitch McConnell and company, let’s look through it a bit.

FDR and the Democrats came up with the New Deal and engaged in Government Spending (TM) to build dams, roads, various types of infrastructure and so on to get people working.

But Government Spending doesn’t work!!! They languished in the Great Depression until the end of the ’30s. (Let’s ignore those inconvenient graphs of employment rates and GDP and such that disprove this.)

See, what really got us out of the Great Depression was World War II. See, the whole nation got together, sent soldiers and such overseas, and we built a whole bunch of guns, bullets, bombs, airplanes, tanks, ships, food, supplies, etc. etc. etc. so we could blow our enemies to tiny bits more efficiently.

How did we pay for all those soldiers and weapons and supplies and such so we could blow Bad Guys to smithereens?

Oh yeah, GOVERNMENT SPENDING!

But I thought government spending didn’t work…

Free trade?  What kind of free do you mean? In the Open Source world, when people are talking about what the term “free software” means, a well-informed geek will tell you about the distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.  Head over to http://www.linuxmint.com/ and you can download a complete Linux system with the OS kernel, a GUI environment, an office suite, web browser, development tools, games, etc. etc. etc. for zero cost.  What’s more important to me is that Linux is free as in speech as well, and that’s a big reason why I’m such a huge fan.  The Linux kernel, as well as most of the software you see on Linux systems, are made available under an open source license.  You get access to the “secret sauce” source code, you can hack it how ever you want, and you can share with your friends and the world.  Do that with Windows and you could get sued or prosecuted.  With Linux, you get freedom.

But ultimately, the point I’m writing about has to do with trade policy.  Here in the U.S., we have a bunch of “free trade” agreements.  We have treaties such as NAFTA, we belong to organizations like the WTO, and we extend tremendous trading privileges to nations such as China, because the prevailing philosophy in government circles is to reduce barriers to trade, in other words, to make trade in goods and materials free-as-in-beer.  There’s a huge problem.  Just as there are multiple definitions of “free” in software, there is also a distinction in trade policy and their economic effects, and the biggest problem is that our current free-as-in-beer trade policy actually causes people here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world to have less economic freedom.

» Continue reading “Why free trade results in less freedom.”