"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen is to go about repeating the very phrases which our fathers used in the struggle for Independence."
---Historian Charles A. Beard

And, in counterpoint -



So, does this mean that the US isn't a nation? Or that Iraq wasn't a nation? Or that our invasion of Iraq was somehow actually done before 12/31/1999?

The 23rd Qualm

(Written by a retired Methodist minister.)

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace
for his ego's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution
and war,
I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control,
they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the
presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me
all the days of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

Just clean up your thinking!

Thursday night

Okay, so I'm loving the new office set up. I love this big, practical furniture. It rocks! I love looking out at the pool through the French doors. Thanks Robert and Dina for helping me!!

Deep Thought™

by digby


Travelling by airplane in the US is nothing more than mass training of Americans to the requirements of the coming police state. The whole point is to make you learn to acquiesce without question, en masse, to completely absurd directives by dull functionaries wearing uniforms.



™Atrios

For those who have asked why not, I offer:

Saturday finishes

Well, this morning I was up at 5:50, so that I could take Miss Jackie outside, make coffee and start making pancakes for RWB, who had to be at work early early. Jackie started clicking around on the wood floors which was a very effective alarm clock for the guest room downstairs - returned about 20 phone calls from prospective renters, hauled out the old AT&T 964 phone, dusted it (really) and set it up to receive phone calls from said prospective renters - thus cutting back on my phone call volume.

Then, drove down to the church to meet with Jean and put up some white boards. From there, back to Manderlay to re-letter the sign with the home phone number and meet people who wanted to walk through. Think I found someone who will rent the place; I expect to hear from them Monday or Tuesday.

A friend tonight linked me to a NYT article that describes a company's effort to assist people who are in trouble with their mortgages that my dad was telling me about last week. Looked them up on the web, and sent them an email, which bounced back.

Crazy.

Got home around 5:30, watched "Keillers Park" on DVD. It was good-ish; but nothing on Weeds - the DVD for Season Three of which should be arriving on Monday.

I believe that RWB is giving me a desktop computer, which will replace both this lappy (that is REALLY tired and weary) and the old desktop computer, which is equally weary.

And, my Treo kicked the bucket today. Well, I needed to go into the Sprint store anyway.

Leaving on vacation in twelve days. Yeep!

Right after I get the subscription bill, he validates my paying for it AGAIN

By Bill in Portland Maine
on Cheers and Jeers

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Late Night Snark...with 100% Humidity

"President Bush is now in Japan for the big G-8 summit, which is going on right now. The G-8 Summit is where the world's top economies get together. The bad news: we are no longer one of them. I wouldn't say the U.S. economy is doing bad, but you know how Bush got to Japan? Southwest."
---Jay Leno
-
"On Fox News, Jesse Jackson was caught saying he wants to cut Barack Obama’s nuts off. This marks the nicest thing ever said about Barack Obama on Fox News."
---Conan O'Brien
-
"In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC's ban on handguns! Finally, the residents of Washington, DC have the right to defend themselves---from each other, one assumes. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, 'It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.' He is right. Killing the Constitution is the president's job. The court's job is to overturn elections."
---Stephen Colbert
-
"Well, you know, Barack Obama, he's started a fashion craze in Italy. Italian designers have taken his look, and they're turning it into fashion. It's an amazing thing. But don't sell John McCain short. He's also influencing fashion. He has popularized the 'something on your chin' look."
---David Letterman
-

And the headline of the week: Bush addresses the Italian prime minister in Spanish: "Amigo! Amigo!"

Hey, America! When you're thinking about which candidate to vote for in November, remember: Republicans invented the punch clock, Democrats invented the weekend. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

One of the rarest

The most appropriate

From the New Yorker

Dropping the Helmsman

Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died. He has done so on Independence Day, which, since he was born too late to own slaves and in too liberal an age to allow him to outlaw sedition, will forever be his only resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

It is rude to speak ill of the dead. Luckily, I did so ahead of time.

His earlier speaking ill of the not yet dead:



When a "colorful" celebrity has achieved some sort of sustained and nominally respectable worldly accomplishment (record sales, business success, public office), and has been around long enough to acquire the appealing vulnerability of old age, and has not been convicted of a capital crime, there's a powerful tendency to go all warm and fuzzy on him. So it is at the moment for Jesse Helms, the senior senator from North Carolina. With his announcement, last Wednesday, that he will not seek a sixth term next year, Helms became a certified legend—the feisty (but always courteous) conservative icon, the plainspoken Tarheel who never feared to be politically incorrect, the paragon of traditional values who always let you know where he stood and is destined to be remembered, as President Bush put it, as "a tireless defender of our nation's freedom and a champion of democracy abroad."

The strangest tribute came from Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and normally a levelheaded (if chronically puckish) observer. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mead described Helms as "one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil rights revolution"—and not, as you might suppose, by provoking disgust and indignation among the fair-minded with the crude racism that was his stock-in-trade (along with an "anti-Communism" that treated liberal reform and Soviet tyranny as indistinguishable). According to Mead, the decisive contribution of Jesse Helms was that "once the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was enacted"—over Helms's unremitting and demagogic opposition, by the way—"he accepted the laws and obeyed them." Also, in edifying contrast to his counterparts of a century earlier, he refrained from "being directly and openly involved in the murder of black political leaders."

Talk about lowering the bar! But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism. Many of the Helms retrospectives of recent days have dated his entry into serious politics to 1960, when, after having spent most of his thirties as a banking lobbyist, he began delivering nightly five-minute commentaries on a Raleigh television station and on something called the Tobacco Radio Network—the job that propelled him into the Senate, twelve years later. But as far back as 1950, Helms, then twenty-eight, helped run what the Duke University historian William H. Chafe has called "the bitterest, ugliest, most smear-ridden campaign of modern times," the race to unseat Frank P. Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina and probably the most distinguished North Carolinian ever to sit in the United States Senate. "The Graham campaign is generally viewed as the most pivotal in modern southern history since it set the precedent for the race-baiting and red-baiting tactics that were later employed so widely by politicians like Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and Jesse Helms," Chafe has written. "Helms, of course, helped invent these tactics." Over the succeeding half century, Helms changed but little. His own campaigns have invariably been powered by appeals to prejudice, racial and otherwise. In recent years the focus of his bigotry has shifted increasingly toward gays and lesbians. But his disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

To be fair, the snub of the South African President probably had less to do with race per se than with foreign policy, the field in which Helms, who since 1986 has been either the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or its ranking Republican, has done his worst mischief. His vaunted anti-Communism was never based upon a principled belief in democracy. His support of the apartheid regime was of a piece with his enthusiasm for any dictatorship, no matter how brutal, that could plausibly be described as right wing. (He even supported the Argentine junta in the Falklands war with Britain.) He has crippled America's diplomatic corps, systematically starving the State Department of funds and capriciously blocking the confirmation of highly qualified ambassadorial nominees. But it is in his unrelenting hostility to international institutions that he has done his greatest and probably most lasting damage.

The gauzy story line of the past week requires Helms to have "mellowed," the main piece of evidence being his agreement, in 1999, to allow payment of some nine hundred million dollars of the $1.3 billion in back dues the United States then owed the United Nations. Never mind that it was he who had abused the rules of the Senate to hold up the payments in the first place, or that the United States was on the verge of being deeply embarrassed by losing its right to vote in the General Assembly. The real significance of the episode is that what was supposed to be legally binding has now been certified as volitional. A new "principle"—that the solemn obligations of the United States are subject to abrogation without notice by congressional ideologues—has become ever more entrenched. America's U.N. bill, by the way, remains unpaid; it now amounts to $2.3 billion, a record, thanks to the machinations of such mini-Helmses as Tom DeLay, the House majority whip. Helms's heirs now populate the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, too: the national-security apparatus of the Bush Administration is heavily salted with his former assistants. Little wonder that the Administration adds almost weekly to the long list of useful international treaties it proposes to reject, abrogate, or simply scrap. The retirement of Jesse Helms has been hailed (and mourned) as "the end of an era." If only that were true.