Saturday Malamute Blogging

He needs a good brushing.

The Professor was cleaning up the backyard when he found Kodi’s stick collection (stashed behind the raised flower bed). Kodi barked indignantly from the dining room window while the prof. put the sticks in a trash bag.

Barbara Ehrenreich Recycles

The following is a blog post I was working up in May in response to a column Ehrenreich posted at Huffington Post. Well, lo and behold, the same column just arrived in this month's Progressive. Recycling is a good thing, right?

Barbara Ehrenreich says:

It's important -- even kind of exhilarating -- for women to embrace their inner bitch...

So Barbara does just that in a post over at HuffPo, entitled Hillary's Gift to Women.

...But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama's face.

That Hillary Clinton set a new low in campaigning will come as a surprise to the Karl Roves and the Lee Atwaters, and pretty much any Republican working on any presidential campaign. C'mon, Barb, did Hillary really sink lower than the robo calls suggesting John McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was his black love child?

Some understandable names come up like Margaret Thatcher and the warrior queen Boadicea, and even Condoleezza Rice, but then she throws in Lynndie England.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run for the Senate.

Lynndie England? Really? The first woman to get close to being POTUS brings to mind Abu Ghraib?

She even makes a PMS reference in this hit piece. I guess we should be thankful Medusa and menopause didn't rear their ugly heads.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Gregorio!

Saturday Malamute Blogging

...from the archives

It's All True

So it turns out the invasion of Iraq was about oil, after all.

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

...

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

And our lapdog journalists report it with little, if any, criticism. It's both old news and new news. Which has been pretty much how all the news about our corrupt government gets reported in the MSM. Forget about impeaching the bastards. It's off the table. Probably knocked to the floor by our "we might nuke Iran" policy.

Nimbeciles

Anybody else sick of the "Tim Russert was the best journalist ever" fantasia? It appears that Chris Matthews, grief-stricken and possibly drunk, divulged that Tim was just a big, fat, frightened patriot, really, who didn't do his job in regard to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At least Tim claimed to believe the sky was falling in the form of a nuclear bomb in Saddam's twitchy little hands, and later blamed his lack of journalistic due diligence on government officials who didn't "pick up the phone" to tell him that Bushco was lying through their teeth.



Hell, I'm not the NBC News' Washington Bureau Chief, but I knew the build-up to the invasion of Iraq was one lie after another. Maybe I should apply for the job now that it's vacant since it appears you don't have to be a professional journalist to get paid to be a professional journalist. You don't even need a working bullshit detector, but I do have one of those.

MSNBC: I didn't mean to hit you, baby!

MSNBC really knows how to sweet talk the ladies:

'It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,' Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. 'And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.'"

I'm speechless.

Blogroll please...

Welcome to John Petty and progressive involvement, Anglachel's Journal, and Astarte's Circus. Welcome to our humble little blog.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Watching the game...

Makes me wanna holler

Well respected astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has a very interesting Op-ed in the NYTimes today.

...If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.
...

Two questions arise in the face of this result. Whom should the Republican candidate prefer to run against to maximize his party’s chances of retaining the White House? And what does it say of the Democratic delegate selection system when its winner would lose the presidency if an election were held today, yet its loser would win it?

Is it stilly fuzzy math when "the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal" uses it?

Friday Malamute Blogging

That doesn't look comfortable.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

Michael Savage decided that the news about Ted was the perfect moment to crawl out his hole and spew.

Following the announcement that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage opened his May 20 show by interspersing audio of Kennedy singing "Ay Jalisco No Te Rajes" with clips of news reporters discussing Kennedy's diagnosis and audio from the 1990 film Kindergarten Cop in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's character says, "It's not a tumor." Later, Savage played the Dead Kennedys song "California Über Alles" after stating: "The poor guy's been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he's been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here's a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please."

After reading from the lyrics of "California Über Alles," Savage said, "No gloating today, no laughter, all serious. You don't joke about a man's cancer. I do it, but I won't do it today; it's something I will not do." At one point in the program, he told a caller, "You know I'm playing the Dead Kennedys not to mock Ted Kennedy. It's just appropriate, that's all."

Later in the program, Savage aired a clip of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) offering a tribute to Kennedy on the Senate floor before describing Byrd as "a senile senator" and "a walking psycho." Savage went on to assert, "For years now, Byrd has been blubbering on the floor of the Senate. For years, I mean, to be honest, Kennedy didn't seem sane to me." He continued, "Forget about the drunk stories and all that -- anybody can drink. The guy sounded like he was off for years, I'm sorry."

Michael Savage is probably going to live a long life and die quietly on the toilet at an unjustifiably old age.

Wow! I think the only thing that would make me feel better after writing that sentence is finding Ann Coulter and punching her in the neck before she can add her shrill two cents.

Don't It Always Seem to Go?

...you don't know what you've got 'til your faced with the possibility of a Democratic senate without a real Democrat. I feel numb.

Sweet Home Chicago

We're #1!
Everyone else is #2 or lower.

The Music Man

Adolph Reed's lastest gem on Barack Obama in this month's issue of The Progressive brought to mind Robert Preston in his finest role:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.
...
Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

Once again, Professor Reed doesn't let us down. Not only does he speak truth to power, he's speaking truth to the bamboozled Left, lost in the afterglow of its collective Obasm.

I think its too late to prevent them from embarrassing themselves (I'm looking at you, editorial board of The Nation, Katha Pollitt, and for God's sake, Barbara Ehrenriech, who wrote, on Valentine's Day, no less, about being swayed by her "grown feminist daughter" weeping inconsolably when Obama lost NH. Sheesh!). We can only hope that, if Obama does win the nomination, the Democrats can pull themselves together and figure out how to build this deeply flawed candidate into someone who can win in November without compromising away all of the things that would make a victory matter in the first place.

And then, maybe, we can all march out of the high school gym to the strains of 76 Trombones.

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Squirrel watching. Or squirrel, watching.

Hateful Speech

Mike Huckabee has just moved to the top of the shit list. I'm not shy about making Obama the butt of a good joke, but this isn't funny:

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

And the audience laughed. Of course, he was giving a speech to the NRA in Kentucky. Check out the youtube video

Bill O'Reilly: The Remix

This just doesn't get old.

Thanks Felicia!