The Fun Lovin’ Criminals
I was reading Crooks and Liars and came across this video with G.Gordon Liddy as the Fox News criminal Republican Point Of View. Sometimes it can take me hours of drawing until I am satisfied with how a caricature looks. G. Gordon Liddy took me about one minute.
The Fun Lovin’ Criminals
“I scream
I yell
I bark
I bite
I hit you with an egg
on a hot summer night!”
The Newshog on Mercenaries-R-Us
The Undeniable Liberal on Martial Law
The Satirical Political Report on George Macaca Allen’s Smutty Book
political, cartoons,political cartoons, parody, satire, Republicans, GOP, Iraq, War, Middle East, Bush, Cheney, G. Gordon Liddy, Fox News, fox, Fun Lovin’ Criminals
Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies
Seriously, does anyone believe this guy anymore? Come on X help me out. You can not actually believe this shit.
TPMmuckraker Nails Phoney Nonprofit
The Progressive Policy Council has been outed as a result of a mailer forwarded to TPMmuckraker by a suspicious Pennsylvanian. Can’t you just taste the desperation?
Tony Blair Demands International Action
In what what will only to be a surprise to those in the U.S. who have willingly guzzled the right-wing rhetorical political Kool-Aid, Tony Blair is now begging for International (read U.S.) action on global climate change.
“What is not in doubt is that the scientific evidence of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is now overwhelming,” he said at the report’s launch at the Royal Society in London.“It is not in doubt that if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous.”
“This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime.
“Unless we act now… these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.
“There is nothing more serious, more urgent, more demanding of leadership - here, of course, but most importantly in the global community.”
That’s right folks, for reasons of greed and political advancement the Bush administration has willingly and knowingly taken a stance on global climate change that is endangering OUR lives and future. One can only hope that in the name of all that is good enough of you will wake the f#@k up in time to make a difference.
Republican Murphy Charged with Wrongdoing by Staff
In an interesting turn of events incumbent Republican Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy has been accused of unethical behavior by his own staffers.
U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, who is seeking his third term in Congress, has mixed campaign activities and official government work in a manner that present and former staffers consider unethical or in violation of House rules, according to interviews with a half-dozen of them.“I see someone in a very high office taking advantage of people and situations, and it’s wrong,” said Jayne O’Shaughnessy, the scheduler in his Mt. Lebanon district office since April 2005. “He’s someone who should know better.”
Considering the general “throw the bums out” mood of PA voters initiated by the state congressional pay raise issue, the presidents’ poor handling of the war in Iraq and the multitudes of Republican ethics scandals plaguing Washington one has to wonder whether Murphy’s alleged ethical violations will tip the scales in favor of his Democratic opponent Chad Kluko.
UPDATE: Thanks to Ol’ Froth for pointing out that Murphy’s alleged behavior sounds an awful lot like the behavior that convicted another Western Pennsylvania legislator in 2005, former State Rep. Jeff Habay, R-Shaler. It is worth noting that Habay is still awaiting trial on 20 counts including “a felony charge of possessing or using a facsimile weapon of mass destruction” for calling in a fake anthrax attack and attempting to attribute it his political opponent.
Michigan GOP Pulls a Willie Horton
LANSING, Mich. - A campaign mailing from the Michigan Republican Party blames Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the state corrections director for a crime spree that resulted in the deaths of three people.
The brochure has a photo of Patrick Selepak, who pleaded guilty to killing Melissa and Scott Berels of New Baltimore and Winfield Johnson of Genesee County’s Vienna Township in February. The headline says: “This violent criminal was mistakenly released into your community.”
“Governor Granholm and her state prison director. If they can’t do the job, why are they still on the job?” the brochure says.
100 Military Fatalities in October: One Cost of Bush’s War Strategy
While Bush hems and haws about what rhetoric to apply to his Iraq strategy, we know that strategy has cost 100 military fatalities in the month of October alone.
The violence will continue to ebb and floe for the next two years and we will continue to see war supporters shift to the fantastical “more troops” position (without, of course, giving any specifics as to from where this magical horde is to appear). They’ll distance themselves from Bush’s failure while pounding their hawkish chests.
Call it what you want … what I call it is “More of the Same.”
As they stand up, we stand down Watch Part MCM
I actually read through Central Command’s press releases as this is an interesting source to see an angle of what is going on. A couple of days ago, an insurgent group ambushed an Iraqi police column and inflicted twenty five dead and twenty or so wounded Iraqi police. Here is the Centcom press release on the incident:
The police under fire fought back in intense house to house fighting.
An element from 1-68 Combined Arms Battalion, 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, Task Force Lightning, was diverted from another mission and rapidly responded to reinforce the IPs in contact.
The reaction force consisted of ground and air elements; they engaged the AIF immediately upon arrival.
Iraqi and Coalition forces engaged AIF with direct fire, killing 18 AIF, wounding eight and capturing 27 more. Additionally, enemy weapons and ammunition were captured.
One Iraqi civilian and 24 IPs were killed in action. Seven IPs were wounded and transported to FOB Warhorse for medical treatment.
Let us assume that the Centcom version of the story is 100% true. It is still not a good story if we look at the underlying data.
First, Centcom is claiming there were at least 51 insurgents involved in the attack. This confirms that the insurgency is very comfortable operating in at least large platoon sized groups, but more likely company sized groups of 100-200 men at a time in the open as it is very rare for an entire unit to be eliminated.
Secondly, the Iraqi police are still dogmeat when faced with a determined attack. They have been dogmeat for last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. A counterinsurgent force needs to be able to inflict 5:1 or better casualties to be making significant military progress against an insurgency, and in this situation, the counterinsurgent force was able to inflict a little less than a 2:1 loss rate on the insurgent attack force.
Finally, this quasi-favorable ratio was only achieved with the intervention of heavily armed and armored American forces. The reaction force was from a heavy mechanized infantry brigade which means either tanks or infantry fighting vehicles backed up by attack choppers. Yet the insurgent force was able to break contact with heavy but acceptable casualties.
Remember, the Iraqi military that is supposed to stand up and replace American troops does not have any air support more powerful than a guy pissing out the back of a Cessna, remember, the Iraqi Army has a double handful of thirty year old tanks that are notably vulnerable to light anti-tank weapons that are more common than snow in Buffalo.
So three year into the process of standing up Iraqi police and military units and a continued campaign designed to pressure and fragment insurgent operational ability and we still have company sized insurgent attacks that would have shattered an equivilant sized Iraqi government security unit except for the intervention of very heavy US units.
The strategy still ain’t working.
Milhous Fillmore Meets The Midnight Cowboy
Denny had dreams of going to the Big City and being a Kept Man for some Rich, Old Corporation. He failed to realize how many Dicks he’d have to play with along the way.
political, cartoons, political cartoons,comic strips, parody,Mallard Fillmore, movies, Midnight Cowboy, Everybody’s Talking, Harry Nilsson, satire,Republicans, GOP, Congress, Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, Denny Hastert, Hastert, Speaker of The House, sexual predators,
Stay the Course? It was rather more of a shock to…
Stay the Course?
It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. ‘I thought we’d always been at war with Eurasia,’ she said vaguely.
-George Orwell
Chapter 5, 1984
State Department sends directions: How to vote for Foley replacement
…but neglects to mention any other candidates.
A State Department email, obtained by RAW STORY, provided troops from Florida’s 16th district with instructions for how to vote for the Republican replacement for Congressman Mark Foley, but omitted other candidates.Under Florida law, votes cast for Foley will be counted toward Joe Negron’s total.
Interesting, I never knew the State Department was a wing of the Republican party. You learn something new every day.
Catch Arianna Huffington on BlogTalkRadio.com
Arianna Huffington, editor of the Huffington Post, nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books, will be conducting a live, global call-in show, via BlogTalkRadio.com.
To Tune In or Speak with Arianna
Visit Arianna Huffington’s Host Channel or Dial in at 1 877- 5HUFFPO (1-877-548-3376) to participate as a live caller.
On Becoming Fearless with Arianna Huffington airs Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 5PM EST on www.blogtalkradio.com. You can also visit www.huffingtonpost.com/becoming-fearless/ to learn more about the show.
Olbermann’s Special Comment on GOP Fearmongering
I know I am a little late on this one but here goes. Keith nails it again. Transcripts below.
——-
Special Comment: Advertising terrorism
The key to terrorism is not the act — but the fear of the act
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
Countdown
Updated: 9:40 p.m. ET Oct 23, 2006
Tonight, a special comment on the advertising of terrorism – the commercial you have already seen.
It is a distillation of everything this administration and the party in power have tried to do these last five years and six weeks.
It is from the Republican National Committee;
It shows images of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri;
It offers quotes from them—all as a clock ticks ominously in the background.
It concludes with what Zawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long ago as 2001: His dubious claim that he had purchased “suitcase bombs.”
The quotation is followed (by sheer coincidence no doubt) by an image of a massive explosion.
“These are the stakes,” appears on the screen, quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson’s infamous nuclear scare commercial from 1964.
“Vote—November 7th.”
There is a cheap “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” quality to the whole thing, and it also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when President Bush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn’t think about—except, obviously, when elections were near.
Frankly, a lot of people seeing that commercial for the first time, have laughed out loud.
But—not everyone.
And therein lies the true threat to this country.
The dictionary definition of the word “terrorize” is simple and not open to misinterpretation:
“To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear.”
Note please, that the words “violence” and “death” are missing from that definition.
The key to terror, the key to terrorism, is not the act—but the fear of the act.
That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotaped statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings.
But why is the Republican Party imitating them?
Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; The Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear.
The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home.
Only the Republicans have a bigger bank roll.
When, last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraq, evidently stalking and killing an American soldier, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mr. Hunter, Republican of California, branded that channel, quote, “the publicist for an enemy propaganda film” and that CNN used it “to sell commercials.”
Another California Republican, Rep. Brian Bilbray, called the video “nothing short of a terrorist snuff film.”
If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your Party’s new advertisement?
And Mr. Hunter, CNN using the video to “sell commercials”?
Commercials!
You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee!
“To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear.”
By this definition, the people who put these videos together—first the terrorists and then the administration—whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking—they are the ones terrorizing you.
By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaida.
But the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.
Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
His distant successor has wasted his administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself.
The vice president, as recently as this month, was caught campaigning with the phrase “mass death in the United States.”
Four years ago it was the now-Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, rationalizing Iraq with “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Days later Mr. Bush himself told an audience that “we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
And now we have this cheesy commercial—complete with images of a faked mushroom cloud, and implications of “mass death in America.”
This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror.
It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and that only you can save them.
Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater.
Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back.
And now the legacy has come to President George Bush.
Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is it not, Mr. President?
And thus more and more of it needs to be made out of less and less actual terror.
After last week’s embarrassing Internet hoax about ‘dirty bombs’ at football stadiums, the one your Department of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public, a self-described “former CIA operative” named Wayne Simmons, cited the fiasco as “the, and I mean the, perfect example of the President’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program - how vital they are.”
Frank Gaffney, once a respected assistant secretary of defense and now the president of something called the Center for Security Policy, added, “one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this, is not only that they’re gunning for us not just in a place like Iraq—but truly, worldwide.”
Of course, the “they” to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out to be a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake—a kid, trying to one-up some other loser in an Internet game of chicken.
His “threat,” referenced seven football stadiums at which dirty bombs were to be exploded yesterday. It began with the one in New York City - even though there isn’t one in New York City. And though the attacks were supposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to start at 1 p.m. ET and the others at 4 p.m. ET.
More over, the kid said he’d posted the identical message on 40 websites since September.
We caught him in “merely” about six weeks, even though the only way he could have been less subtle, less stealthy, and less of a threat was if he’d bought an advertisement on the Super Bowl broadcast.
Mr. Bush, this is the—what? – 100th plot your people have revealed, that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding, or the fabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a water board in Eastern Europe?
If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work that your new ad implies that only you and not the Democrats can do, you, sir, need to pull over and ask for directions.
The real question of course, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security even release this information in the first place?
It was never a serious threat. Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman as admitting “strong skepticism”—the kind of strong skepticism which most government agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.
So that leaves two options, Mr. President.
The first option: you and your department of Homeland Security don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying “we’re safe” and saying “but we’re not safe enough,” and contrary to the vice president’s swaggering pronouncements about the lack of another attack since 9/11, the last five years has been just an accident.
Or there’s the second option: your political operatives leaked this nonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out that commercial—to scare the gullible.
Obviously the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is all of the above.
There are some of us who could forgive you for trying to run your candidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing your party’s existence to “Death and Attacks Us.”
It’s cynical and barbaric.
But, after all, it may be merely the natural extension of the gutter politics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over from baseball, and the business world of other people’s money.
But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe you somehow competent in keeping others from doing so.
Yet, last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City, were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the World Trade Center site, when they stumbled on to the impossible: human remains from 9/11.
Bones and fragments.
Eighty of them.
Some as much as a foot long.
The victims had been lying, literally in the gutter, for five years and five weeks.
The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead—who had been grimly told in May of 2002 that there were no more remains to be found—were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened again.
And over the weekend they’ve found still more remains.
And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times five years ago.
For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush—the living and the dead—it’s a touch of 9/11 all over again.
And the mayor of this city, who called off the search four-and-a-half years ago is a Republican.
The governor of this state with whom he conferred is a Republican.
The House of Representatives, Republican.
The Senate, Republican.
The President, Republican.
And yet you can actually claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?
You can’t even recover our dead from the battlefield—the battlefield in an American city—when we’ve given you five years and unlimited funds to do so!
While signing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, “there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11th, 2001. Yet we’ll always honor their memory, and we will never forget the way they were taken from us.”
Except, of course, for the ones who’ve been lying under a manhole cover for five years.
Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat yourselves on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq, and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America;
Just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government, in time of crisis, in this country’s history!
“These are the stakes,” indeed, Mr. President.
You do not know what you are doing.
And the commercial—the one about which Zawahiri might say “hey, pretty good—we love your choice of font style”?
All that need further be said is to add three words to Shakespeare.
Mr. President, you, and that advertisement of terror, are full of sound and fury—signifying (and competent at) nothing.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
Stop Making Sense
I haven’t posted a cartoon in almost 2 weeks. I’ve had The Blues…
I see that not much has changed in the last couple of weeks. George Bush is still a Psycho Killer, spreading lies about Iraq.. And while Republican chances of retaining control of both the House and The Senate appear slim, I’m still waiting for the Party of Tom Delay to pull the Diebold Ace out of their assholes.
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense,Making Sense
political, cartoons, political cartoons,Talking Heads,david byrne, parody, satire, Middle East, Iraq, Bush, War,
Let’s All Waterboard! Funny stuff from blog buddy…
Let’s All Waterboard!
Funny stuff from blog buddy I.M. Dedd.
PA-14 House Activism
Okay, we are in the final stretch, and Democrats look like they are in
pretty good shape for the House, and a bit tougher shape for the
Senate. One of the reasons that Democrats are in good shape for the
House is that the list of winnable seats still seems to be expanding.
To continue this expansion, second and third tier campaigns need
resources, and resources means money for the next two weeks and
volunteers for the last week.
However since these races are second and third tier races, the
organizational capacity to quickly raise money is most likely lacking,
so these candidates will be reliant on national coordinated campaign
money, which means either DNC or DCCC money. One of the easiest
sources of additional DCCC money is from Democratic incumbents who
have significant cash on hand and either no challenger or a token
challenger.
Mike Doyle is one of these incumbents. According to Open
Secrets, Congressman Doyle has roughly $280,000 cash on hand as of
Sept. 30, 2006.
Please call his campaign office at 412-244-9101 and ask him to
transfer a portion of his current cash on hand to the DCCC in order to
help fund more competive and marginal races. Additionally thank him
for his current support for the DCCC as he has already overpaid his DCCC dues.
Politics DCCC, Democrats Mike
Doyle
The Earth Is Not Enough…
I swear, folks - you can’t make this stuff up!