Dems Bad!!

Feh, a NYTimes editorial this morning, "High-Tech Smear Tactics" bemoans the fact that there are groups in Connecticut making robo-calls agains three vulnerable republican congressmen.

Funny, but I don't recall the NY Times writing an editorial condemning these tactics when they were used against John Kerry, Max Cleland or Tom Daschle. Republicans used them first, the Times moans, but how dare democratic groups use them too!!

I guess what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander- not when the gander is a democrat.

Friday Kitty blogging

For once I'm happy the boy has food on his mouth. That means he had some breakfast this morning, always a good thing.

Awwwwww.... Leo is plushy!!

I love this story- Leo the snowleopard was found orphaned in the snow after the earthquake in Pakistan last year by a shepard. The shepard took him in and hand fed him, saving his plushy little life.

Now Leo is a big kitten (60 pounds) and he's getting an all expenses paid trip to New York City to live at the Bronx Zoo. Pakistan is getting funds for a snow leopard conservation center in return.



My, what big feeties Leo has!

A happy, plushy ending for everyone involved.

Via the BBC, Leo the Snow Leopard is US Bound

What Lieberman is really like...

Sorry, this will be the last Lieberman post for a while, but I've been meaning to link to Matt Taibbi's current Road Rage column in Rolling Stone, Lieberman, Bush's Favorite Democrat. It was written pre-primary, but it's so savage that it's well worth a look.

And he's outta there. The whole thing takes about eight minutes. You can keep your political speeches pretty short in the year 2006 if you don't once mention the words "war" or "Iraq." Next stop: firemen in Fairfield. I'm still gathering my shit in the church foyer when I see his caravan zooming past the entrance, back toward the highway.

The scene says everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. It spends its weekdays sucking off the Pentagon and Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, and on the weekends it comes out and spends five minutes getting teary-eyed for the "I have a dream" speech and thinks you owe it your vote because of it. Some party members agree, but quite a few don't, which is why Joe Lieberman—the hawkish one-time vice-presidential candidate who has made himself the most visible symbol of the "new" Democrats—is facing a surprising primary challenge on August 8th. Like Lieberman himself, the "I was there in the Sixties" act is finally getting old.

~snip~

No one has played the role of that "winner" more enthusiastically, or more often, than Joe Lieberman. He is everything a Washington insider loves in a politician. He is pompous, pious and available. Routinely one of the very top recipients of campaign donations from the insurance, pharmaceutical and finance sectors, and a man whose wife, Hadassah, is a pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton, Lieberman has quietly become one of the greatest allies corporate America has in Washington.

For example, Lieberman, who as chairman of the DLC in the mid to late Nineties presided over an organization heavily subsidized by companies such as AIG and Aetna (the latter of which also contributes lavishly to his campaigns), sponsored a bill that limited auto insurance suits by permitting the offering of lower rates to consumers who forfeited their right to sue. He has fought for similar anti-lawsuit laws for tobacco, for HMOs, for pharmaceutical companies. Victor Schwartz, general counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, once bragged that "if it were not for Lieberman, there would never have been a Biomaterials Access Act"—a 1998 law that protected companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont (also big DLC contributors) from lawsuits filed for the production of defective medical implants. Yes, that's right: Joe Lieberman fought for the principle of manufacturing faulty fake tits with impunity.

In a move that was perfectly characteristic of everything he stands for, Lieberman in 2001 offered a piece of legislation, S. 1764, that purported to provide incentives to companies that develop medicines to treat the victims of bioterror attacks but, more important, extended the patent life of a wide range of drugs for several years, delaying the introduction of more cost-friendly generic drugs. Shilling for the socialist subsidy of drug companies while masquerading as a Churchillian, tough-on-security Democrat in the War on Terror age: That's Joe Lieberman, and the modern Democratic Party, in a nutshell.

There's more, go read the whole thing. If you haven't learned to hate Joe for his classless morphing into Dick Cheney, Jr. the past two days, you will when you get through with the article.

Lieberman, the ego that ate Connecticut

Or would like to. Krugman (sorry, TimesSelect) takes holy Joe to task, along with the ninnies who are championing him:

Take a look at Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco,” the best account yet of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. The prime villain in that book is Donald Rumsfeld, whose delusional thinking and penchant for power games undermined whatever chances for success the United States might have had. Then read Mr. Lieberman’s May 2004 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, “Let Us Have Faith,” in which he urged Mr. Rumsfeld not to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, because his removal “would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America’s presence in Iraq.”

And that’s just one example of Mr. Lieberman’s bad judgment. He has been wrong at every step of the march into the Iraq quagmire — all the while accusing anyone who disagreed with him of endangering national security. Again, on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered “sensible”? But I know the answer: on Planet Beltway.

snip

So what’s really behind claims that Mr. Lieberman is sensible — and that those who voted against him aren’t? It’s the fact that many Washington insiders suffer from the same character flaw that caused Mr. Lieberman to lose Tuesday’s primary: an inability to admit mistakes.

snip

The question now is how deep into the gutter Mr. Lieberman’s ego will drag him.

I submit that it's actually worse than Krugman says- Lieberman isn't going to admit he made a mistake on Iraq because he doesn't think he made one. I have heard him say, multiple times the past few days, that he doesn't regret his vote on Iraq and he believes invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

In my opinion, that's worse than being mistaken. He's saying that all of the Iraqi deaths, all of the blood, chaos and horror were worth it. He's saying that pre-emptive war is a legitimate strategy.

He's not a centrist, he's a sociopath. It's telling that the majority of his current cheerleaders are all in the republican party.

The question isn't how far into the gutter Lieberman's ego will drag him, it's how far will it drag the rest of us? The democratic party needs to kick him to the curb now. He's shown where his loyalties lie, let him get down in the gutter with them.

Thursday plush update

Sorry for the light kitty posting this week. As you plushy-thralls can see, his royal plushiness is still doing okay.

Happy kitty blogging

Lion kitty Maxx and his peep minion are happy and relaxed now that Lamont won the primary. They just wish Lieberman would do the right thing and go the fuck away.

More Partisianship please

I'm glad that Lieberman lost tonight- he's an wanker and he needs to go.

His "concession" speech tonight was a study in self-absorbed arrogance. His refusal to respect the wishes of Connecticut voters disqualifies him from any support from the democratic establishment.

I want to hear ALL of them say they've supporting Lamont and they're going to actively campaign for him. Otherwise the lot of them are dead to me.

One more thought- I don't want to hear about how partisianship is "awful." I want more of it. I want hyper-partisianship until there's not one single, reactionary, crooked republican left in Washington, D.C.

There is no point whatsoever in working or compromising with those lunatics. End of story.

Lieberman, go away. Just go.

Earlier this evening I was flipping channels and I ran across the repeat of Press the Meat. Lanny Davis was on with someone from the Lamont campaign to talk about the Connecticutt primary. Now I haven't posted much (if at all) on this issue because I don't live in Connecticut, and others (namely Digby and Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone) have said just about all that needs to be said on the subject. But Mr. Davis truly and royally pissed me off.

Davis apparently has a new book out, in which he decries (oh, lawdy!!) the excess of vitriol and hate that abounds in political discourse, which he pointed out on MTP, is abundantly on display on blogs and has been unfairly leveled at Senator Lieberman.

Phooey.

We have a right to be mad. And nothing made me madder than when Lieberman lectured me on how wrong I was to criticise and undermine the President on his war policy. I took that very fucking personally. And I've been hearing for weeks about how mean bloggers and democratic "crazies" are opposed to Lieberman because he reaches across the aisle and attempts to work in a bi-partisan manner.

Let's address these one at a time. On the "bipartisianship" issue, yes, I oppose anyone who wants to work with the thugs and crooks who have systematically looted the treasury and turned congressional graft into a high art. Why in god's name would anyone want to be collegial with people who think it's appropriate to hold a minimun wage hike hostage to the repeal of the estate tax which would only benefit the very richest in american society? People so mean spirited that they want to stop states from using welfare block grants to send poor people to college so that they can get off welfare permanently? People who have shut democrats out of the legislative process for the past 6 years?

Give me a fucking break. I don't want bipartisianship. I want some new blood in there that will wipe the temple clean of the graft and bullshit that is business as usual on capitol hill. Lieberman can't be part of the solution because he's a big part of the problem. Hell, he can't even see that there's a problem.

As for the war, tonight Lieberman claimed that he never tried to squash dissent about the war in Iraq.

Lieberman also sought to clarify a December comment in which he appeared to upbraid Democrats for criticizing Bush, saying that "in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." On Sunday he said the words were meant not to stifle criticism but to warn against the kind of partisan exploitation that he said Republicans had used against Cleland.

Appeared to upbraid democrats? Well, excuse me if I beg to differ. Mr. Lieberman's attempts at radical authorial revisionist intentionalism aside, his remarks were quite clear. Words have meaning, and a senator of Mr. Lieberman's experience knows enough to be careful and precise with language. It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

As for the war itself, Lieberman still defends his vote on the war, while claiming that he's been oh-so-critical of Bush and the gang who can't shoot straight. Nonsense. As Bob Herbert says today:

Despite the rationalizations now suddenly on the lips of so many, the problem with the current war in Iraq is not the way it was conducted, but the fact of the war itself. It was launched amid blinding, billowing clouds of deceit. There was never any legitimate reason for the war. Iraq had not attacked the U.S. and there was no imminent threat of attack.

The U.S. went in with guns blazing (“shock and awe”) like Matt Dillon shooting up the dusty streets of Dodge City. Only this was the real world, and the result has been unending tragedy.

snip

We went into Iraq with bombs falling and guns blazing, insisting all the while that we were bringing the Iraqis the gifts of freedom and democracy. Instead, we gave them terror, chaos and civil war — in other words, a whole new generation of misery and mass death.

Regime change. Preemptive war. These are ideas that are appalling atrocities visited on the world by the Bush administration and their enablers. Lieberman hasn't disavowed any of it. What part of "war is bad" and it kills people doesn't he get?

I have no doubt that if Lieberman survives his primary challenge he will immediately claim vindication of all of his misguided "principals." He thinks he's entitled to that seat. He thinks he knows better than the democatic voters of his state.

I hope they show him the error of his ways and send him packing.

Maybe Lanny Davis is right. Maybe we are full of vitriol and hatred. But by god, those wankers, and Mr. Lieberman in particular, have earned it in spades. Ye reap what you sow, assholes, ye reap what you sow.

Saturday update

Young lion kitty Maxx is doing fine tonight. He's out for a prowl and seems to be putting a little flesh back on.

Friday Kitty-cat blogging

Retro plushy!!

The vet is saying the bartonella test won't be back for another week (grrrr). In the meantime, the receptionist said it's fine that he's out of antibiotics, he can wait another week. (double grrrrr) "No, go back and speak to the doctor again. We do not want Mr. Plushy to have a relapse since his mouth isn't healed yet, now do we?" No call-back yet.

In the meantime, Mr. Plushy felt well enough to go out for a prowl last night and to play with his particle accelerator. If he'd just start killing his carrot again I'd feel we were really getting somewhere.

Update:
The vet called back and said antibiotics should continue for the time being. I'm sure lion kitty Maxx will be annoyed, but I'm relieved.

The plushy report

Lion kitty Maxx is doing just fine today, still on the mend. He sends purrrrrs out to all of his plushy thralls.

Mr. Plushy!!

For his fan club.

Busy Day

A very, very busy day for me, but rest assured, Mr. Plushy seems to be on the mend. In the meantime, go read Billmon, he has all the scoop on the Israel/Lebanon clusterfuck.

It appears to me that the Israelis have simply lost their minds. My suggestion to them is that they quit listening to Cowboy George and Biggus Dickus. They don't know what the fuck they'e doing. And now, it appears the Israelis don't either. And the entire arab world knows it.

Get a grip.

Condolences

Max Baucus's (D-Montana) nephew was killed in Anbar province over the weekend.

Montana senator's nephew dies in Iraq

Terrible.

Plushy update

Lion kitty Maxx was sleeping peacefully in my desk chair when I left for work this morning, so all seems well for now. His abcess is still draining, but he seems comfortable enough. (Once I held him down and squirted his antibiotics in his mouth)

Thanks for all the good vibes everyone has been sending.

So far so good

The first round of tests came back and so far it looks like it's just an infection. We won't know for sure without a biopsy, but with his history we're going to wait and see how he responds to the antibiotics. No bartonella results until the end of the week.

Many thanks to all of you who sent Mr. Plushy good juju today.

Send good juju now, please

Mr. Plushy isn't feeling so brave today. And neither am I, for that matter. I'm worried sick that his tests are going to come back showing that he has a malignancy.

Any positive spells, prayers or other alternate dimension interventions would be appreciated.

Brave kitty blogging

Mr. Plushy is being very brave about taking his meds today. What a good boy.

Insanity

I had the misfortune to log onto c-span to stream the presser with Blair and Bush today. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. From Bush:

BUSH: It's an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

For a while, American foreign policy was just, "Let's hope everything is calm" -- kind of, managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

Too bad Bush doesn't have a fucking clue what the root causes of terrorism are, and he is clueless to the fact that our actions today are going to be the root cause of terrorism for decades to come.

"This is a moment of intense conflict in the Middle East," Bush said in an appearance with Blair in the East Room. "Yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity and a chance for a broader change in the region."

Another moment of clarity, eh?

What's crystal clear to every arab on the planet is that Bush thinks large numbers of arab civilian casualties are acceptable as long as the US and Israel are safe. That message is unmistakable.

This nonsense that "they hate us for our freedom" has got to stop. They hate us for what we do, pure and simple.

I have to ask, isn't there a single, sane person around Bush who has the balls to stand up and tell him he's off his fucking rocker? And would someone put Blair back in his kennel? His yapping is beginning to get on my nerves.

I am astonished, once again, that a man so profoundly stupid, so profoundly ignorant of both world affairs and human nature is president of the United States.