The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terra -- the CIA program I set up to torture the living shit outta folks. You should see the videos. They crack me up. I got me a full set - hehehehe.

The Freepers express their concern over a helicopter with 3 American senators aboard making an emergency landing in Afghanistan:

This tax rebate scam has me pissed off. None of the way they present it even makes sense.

Here's the reality as I see it.

As a nation, we are in debt, great debt. Each of us is deeply in debt through our government debt. We aren't paying down on that debt. We pay high taxes yet we barely manage to make the interest payments on that debt.

Now the folks in DC are planning on taking out an additional loan in our name and handing us the money. Then, from what I hear, we, as good consumers are supposed to spend the money on consumer items. In other words, just blow it. The billions that are going to be handed to businesses however are supposed to be used to buy equipment, an investment to be used to make them more money, unlike the money handed to the consumers - us.

Here's the deal. First a quote from a story you should read after reading this diary, because then it all makes sense.

When Bush walked arm-in-arm with Abdullah at his ranch nearly three years ago, oil cost $54 a barrel, a level the Saudi government admitted then was "clearly too high."

Oil is now hovering near $100 a barrel and many Americans are griping about their tax dollars helping to underwrite the defense of wealthy Gulf allies, so the issue may come up again.

Bush will spend Tuesday sightseeing, meeting Saudi entrepreneurs and visiting with U.S. embassy staff, and he has already given his royal host good reason to be pleased.

Trying to counter Iran's growing military clout in the region, Bush made clear on Monday his commitment to go ahead with a major arms sale to Saudi Arabia.

I don't expect a lot from the MSM. But this is ridiculous.

Check this C&P from an AP story this morning by Nedra Pickler: http://news.yahoo.com/...

Clinton's win stunned both campaigns. She had been preparing to shift strategy to save her candidacy, while Obama had been hoping momentum would carry him to the nomination by Feb. 5 — when 22 states hold Democratic nominating contests.

Now the race will focus on who can score in the two states that come between now and them — Nevada on Jan. 19 and South Carolina on Jan. 26.

Now, I'm from the state of MI, (kinda still), in fact I'm from the Flint area, where our primary will be held on January 15, or as Ms. Pickler would say, "between now and them."

I haven't been by Dkos in several months, so it came as a surprise to me to see so little good stuff in the recommended diaries list.

Inasmuch as I do like reading interesting diaries I thought I'd just go find some to read. With your help.

I quote a friend of mine, a labor organizer, a musician, a man who has a lot to say and says it well. He doesn't think his comments worthy of a DKos diary. I do.

I call this one "Leadersheep."

Here 'tis:

Here's an amusing 2008 political platform idea they're pushing hard over at Freeperville:

  1.  Win the war!
  2. Secure the nation!
  3. Secure the borders!
  4. Stop the illegal aliens!
  5. Rebuild the military!
  6. Deal with growing threats! Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, (and an increasingly Muslim Russia and Europe?)!
  7. Cut government!
  8. Cut spending!
  9. Cut taxes!
 10. Allow the free economy to expand!
 11. Return control of states issues to the states!
 12. Defend life, liberty, property and individual rights!

As we all know, the rec list has some problems. In fact, that's why Diary Rescue was created and that has helped keep important diaries from becoming lost in the shuffle. But still there are losses of valuable diaries and important information simply because of the inherent design of the diary rec system.

Here's a suggestion for improving it.

Warning: Cheap shots and sarcasm used throughout.

We've heard little about Condi Rice's State Department lately. But thse folks are still there, doing what they do, which is more than likely some cause for concern. One of the many things they do in return for your tax dollars is the efficient dispelling of groundless rumors, an admirable undertaking.

One prominent recent rumor involved claims that the president, or his father, or both, had bought up large tracts of land in Paraguay. Since I really hate rumors and really like to get my facts straight I went to the State Department's web site to get the lowdown on that right from the horses mouth, as it were.

After all, who would know better what our prez is up to than our Secretary of State, who has followed him around like a little lost puppy for the last several years? You can probably tell I don't much care for Condi - something about her being busy shopping while a whole American city was drowning and foreign governments were frantically attempting to provide us with emergency aid. Condi had other priorities, Ferragamo shoes.

The wingnut spin machine. A review of and observations on one specific failure.

The input:

FORT CAMPBELL, Kentucky (AP) -- A U.S. soldier was sentenced to 100 years in prison Thursday for the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family last year.

Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, 24, also was given a dishonorable discharge. He will be eligible for parole in 10 years under the terms of his plea agreement.

Cortez, of Barstow, California, pleaded guilty this week to four counts of felony murder, rape and conspiracy to rape in a case considered among the worst atrocities by U.S. military personnel in Iraq.

Now here's the spin machine startin' up (or at least tryin' to) over at FreeRepublic:

I'm a Liberal in a lot of ways. And one of the most fundamental ways is my belief that people do great things on those occasions when they work together, help each other, instead of forever competing with each other at anything and everything. With the wins in the recent election, Daily Kos has shown just the sort of great thing that such teamwork can accomplish.

In light of that I have a simple request of those among us who might be able to help. I'm rebuilding a couple of older computers for use by some folks who have very little money for tech gear. The hardware is no problem for me to configure, but I am forever behind the curve when it comes to software.

When this administration invaded Iraq despite the failure of the weapons inspectors to find WMD I predicted it would be a fiasco, another Vietnam. I was not alone in that prediction, far from it.

On more than one occasion since then I have likened it to Mr. Bush driving a bus off of a cliff, and the long destructive process of disintegration on the way to the bottom. Quite simply, I pointed out that it was a done deal from the moment the invasion began. Nothing has changed that. Nothing really can. That was my point. But now, with "surge," the prez has brilliantly conceived of a way to get still more passengers on the bus.

Perhaps I should congratulate him for devising a plan of action I had entirely overlooked. But I won't.

I check my previous days comments each morning to see if they received any further comments or questions, or answers to questions I may have asked. Especially questions, as giving and getting answers to questions is an important part of the great value of dKos.

I was surprised this morning to find I'd received 62  "4" recommends from this comment:

* [new] 'We' are becoming the media. (62+ / 0-)

It's up to us to spread news these days. Start clicking.

by John West on Thu Jun 01, 2006 at 02:14:41 PM PDT

That's a lot of 4's so I sat for a bit and thought about why that happened.

Political campaigns follow a very traditional format, at least they did until the netroots came along and Howard Dean got a lot of blog support.

Now they follow a very traditional format, but with extra money from the "Internets."

It's long past time to change that some more. So, let's do some brainstorming and start listing everyone's good ideas for breaking away from traditional campaigns, in small ways or large, new things, different things, better things. There are a whole lot of us, we're pretty smart and we have a lot of good ideas. Express 'em here, then comment on the ideas of others and improve them all.

 This is part II of my Wyoming diary. Yes it does say "Best" in the title, and no, I don't need to fix it.
It's after midnight now and a new day, so here's my Saturday diary.

The wild pootie cat I mentioned in my previous diary is outside now in the deep darkness that is only a commonplace occurrance to the eyes of rural Americans. No street lights, no street even, just a very long rough gravel drive up to a house with a single outdoor light turned on, a light that acts as a sort of poor man's lighthouse for family and friends. At the end of the drive is an old cattle guard, rusting and sinking slowly into the wind blown Wyoming dust.

I'm blogging live from the belly of the beast, east central Wyoming. It ain't quite rural Utah, so nobody here has more than one wife, but the pootie that just climbed up on my shoulder could probably go toe to toe with a mountain lion, so there he sits. It ain't as if it were up to me.

That's the way the folks around here seem to be feeling these days. It ain't up to them. But they seem, (let me take that back, they are) frustrated about the way things in our country and the world are going. To be honest, the folks I've talked to, which is admittedly only a few, are close to clueless about the actual state of both our country and the world, and they still aren't happy.

I often compare the content of topics discussed here in dKos with the same topics discussed on Right Wing sites. That's not as easy as it sounds though. Most topics are looked at with such a different slant between Lefty and Righty sites that they are hardly recognizable as parts of the same discussion.

But the topic of the suspected massacre by US troops of an entire family, three year old and all, who lived near the site of an IED attack, was uncommon in that it was actually perceived as the same story at both dKos and FreeRepublic.

Reading their thread was instructive enough that I decided to diary it. We pretty much know the dKos take on the story. Below is the Freeper take.