buhdydharma, the founder of this franchise, has the following contention-
One of the most impressive things about YOU, fellow Kossaks, is the breadth of knowledge YOU have accumulated. Smarts spanning from aardvarks to Zymurgy. If you ask a question on Dkos, ANY question, it WILL be answered, at the very least with a link or a clue!
It's true we have a large variety of expertise.
I am shallow and one dimensional. I have a passing knowledge of a variety of things and it's hard not to come up with a couple of suggestions for a Goggle search failing all else.
Among subjects I'm prepared to give advice on is computer repair since that's my primary source of income. I'm also considered by some to be fairly reliable on how the Daily Kos website works. You might wish to read an all-in-one digest or any of my 13 part New Users Guide or my less structured and indexed work collected as Welcome New Users.
But it's not about my expertise. Indeed I never pretend anything except that you can duplicate my experiments and replicate my results. Ask A Kossack is intended to be a more general purpose forum so that we can share information.
As buhdy always reminds us-
PLEASE REMEMBER, THIS IS A COOPERATIVE EFFORT!!!
MAKE SURE YOU TRY TO ANSWER A FEW QUESTIONS WHILE YOU ARE HERE!!! |
Which brings me to an important point I can not over emphasize! This is a Community Diary! It's supposed to be fun!
buhdy is the pony master. Thousands of them in his unlimited Photobucket Account (none of them the one I was looking for mind you). I, as you can see, am a little more text minded. It's a different kind of fun.
All questions, even the silly ones, get answered. The profound ones take longer and some questions have no good answer at all.
- I'm sorry. I have every confidence you'll be able to recover the data from that Vista machine.
Now I'm sure that your number one question is-
Taking a well deserved rest. What's it to you?
Glenn Greenwald-
No matter what metric one uses, it's difficult to overstate what a profound failure the Bush presidency is, and everyone -- including Bush -- knows that. The most important aspect of this Tuesday's election is to finalize their humiliating repudiation and to bury them for what they've done. |
I'm highly motivated to get out the door on Tuesday.
You see I'm a 5%er. Someone who thought H. W. the war hero CIA spook's idiot slacker son was an unmitigated disaster for the United States from the day he slimed his way into the Texas Governorship.
He abused animals as a child. It's a bad sign and one record amounts of jocular death warrants doesn't mitigate.
I did not feel any differently on Septempber 11th. I watched a nation gone mad with vengeance unite under a sadistic fool who thinks torture is fraternity hazing because his silver foot born on third base thinks he hit a triple legacy ass was in one that was so populated by like minded perverts that they thought this was normal behavior.
Alphas anyone?
Privacy? What's privacy? Heh, heh. All just a prank.
Why sure I took from the treasury. I was president of the club and my buddy here has the checkbook. What's wrong with that?
And that house burning down, sure am sorry about those thousands of dead people because who could have imagined...
MS. RICE: Let me address this question because it has been on the table. I think that concern about what I might have known or we might have known was provoked by some statements that I made in a press conference.
I was in a press conference to try and describe the August 6th memo, which I've talked about here in my opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session. And I said at one point that this was a historical memo, that it was not based on new threat information, and I said no one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon -- I'm paraphrasing now -- into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile.
As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said "I" could not have imagined, because within two days, people started to come to me and say, "Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999, the intelligence community did look at information about this."
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us. I cannot tell you that there might not have been a report here or a report there that reached somebody in our midst. |
But before I let him off the hook as just a grinning sociopathic narcissist, John Wayne Gacy on a grand scale, I want to talk about the establishment that enabled him.
I blame Poppy and Mumsy both. Individually and collectively. What does it take, what kind of diseased culture do you come from that you can raise a child this spoiled and selfish?
What about lying conniver Karl, the porcine pig Turdblossom (not my insult for a change) SUPERGENIUS who has orchestrated that permanent Republican majority. How about your DUI attorney Fredo? Is it uncomfortable for you when Anakin moves your lips or are you used to it by now?
Heh. Hatch Act? Jest trivial bylaws, I have the BOARD behind me.
As in thank you sir may I have another? Oh indeed you do. The Delays and Frists and Santorums and Hasterts. The Miers and Boltons and Boltens and Cards and Rumsfelds and Feiths and Wolfowitzs. The Yoos and the Addingtons and the ...
See, this is where you get to chime in.
In fact the entire Republican Party is pretty much an organized crime syndicate. Theft, extortion, murder for hire...
Remember when that drunk Blackwater mercenary shot that bodyguard to Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi?
Hah. And you think your eksmas party was bad.
This is a gang that can't shoot straight. Where is Diego Garcia's head anyway? In Iraq?
Sorry. It would be such a shame if your nice dictatorship had an accident.
Some accident. $10 billion dollars a month or more, month after endless Friedman Unit. 1 soldier a day during the slow periods. Hundreds of thousands of brown people dead and millions displaced (yeah, I know brown people don't count).
And let's talk about our idiot Media. The blow dried buffoon bozo beltway buttkissing airheads who's only talents are reading from a teleprompter (they used to call them clue cards and pay union people to hold them).
More Greenwald-
I want to focus on another aspect of Reston's confessional. Reston sadly describes -- and I do mean "sadly" -- how everything has now changed between McCain and reporters, how "that intimacy -- real or imagined -- has evaporated." Tragically, McCain "began calling more often on reporters he didn't know," and Reston complains that her good friend McCain recently snubbed her by ignoring her question at a campaign event: "The man who once asked me about my wedding date returned my gaze with a stare, shook the hand of the strangers to the right and left of me and continued out the door."
Reston blames herself, at least in part, for the loss of friendship between McCain and his reporters. Back in July, with a couple of other reporters, she approached him at the back of his "Straight Talk Express" bus, when "as always McCain warmly motioned for us to squeeze in beside him on the couch." She then committed a terrible sin: she asked The Maverick a question -- whether he "agreed with his advisor Carly Fiorina's recent statement that it was unfair for some health insurance companies to cover Viagra but not birth control" -- which, as a long-time opponent of health insurance mandates, he was visibly uncomfortable answering and to which he was unable to provide a coherent response, resulting in a video that was widely used by "liberals and late-night comedians" and which was "embarrassing" for McCain.
What was Reston's reaction once she realized that she was the cause of McCain's embarrassment? This: "my stomach churned and my cheeks grew hot." By abusing the access granted to her to make John McCain look bad, she knew she had done wrong. She breached the core agreement between McCain and his reporters -- access and friendship in exchange for positive coverage -- which is also, by the way, the flagship principle of the modern American journalist generally. |
Let them call me rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being who, at the last day, shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language and this is one. There are persons too who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them. They solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful.
It is the madness of folly to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war. The cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. |
As someday it may happen
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list — I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs —
All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs —
All children who are up in dates, and floor you with 'em flat —
All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like that —
And all third persons who on spoiling tête-á-têtes insist —
They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!
Chorus.
He's got 'em on the list — he's got 'em on the list;
And they'll none of 'em be missed — they'll none of 'em be missed.
There's the banjo serenader, and the others of his race,
And the piano-organist — I've got him on the list!
And the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face,
They never would be missed — they never would be missed!
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who "doesn't think she dances, but would rather like to try";
And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist —
I don't think she'd be missed — I'm sure she'd not he missed!
Chorus.
He's got her on the list — he's got her on the list;
And I don't think she'll be missed — I'm sure she'll not be missed!
And that Nisi Prius nuisance, who just now is rather rife,
The Judicial humorist — I've got him on the list!
All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life —
They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed.
And apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind,
Such as — What d'ye call him — Thing'em-bob, and likewise — Never-mind,
And 'St— 'st— 'st— and What's-his-name, and also You-know-who —
The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you.
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list,
For they'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!
Chorus.
You may put 'em on the list — you may put 'em on the list;
And they'll none of 'em be missed — they'll none of 'em be missed! |
Eliminating the Republican Party at all levels of government is not a sufficent remedy.
It is merely a pre-requisite.
It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don't assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I've explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness -- reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.
Much of this is deeply embedded in the political culture. Very few people in the political and media establishment object to any of it; most either tacitly accept or actively believe in it. And the natural instinct of political officials -- especially new arrivals determined to achieve all sorts of things -- is to consolidate, not voluntarily relinquish, extant political power. It will help to have in the Oval Office someone who has, at least at times, evinced the right instincts on these matters (even though during other times he has acted contrary to them), and the better outcome on Tuesday (the defeat of John McCain) will likely ensure some very modest, marginal improvements in terms of the rule of law, executive power abuses and constitutional transgressions. But that outcome is merely necessary, not remotely sufficient; the election by itself will not produce fundamental changes in most of these areas. That's going to take much more than a single election, standing alone, can or will accomplish. |
PS. Vote NO on Connecticut Proposition 1.