What's Your F@*king Problem (WYFP) is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

We Americans are supposed to be an optimistic bunch.  That's the myth we're told from childhood, part and parcel of the notion of American exceptionalism.  Everything is bigger, better, more easily achievable than anywhere else on earth.  Riches and joy will be showered down upon you if you just tend your very own money tree and live your life.  We sleep the sleep of the just and kind, and our dreams are peaceful and sweet.  So we should relax and stop worrying, because we're Americans, we're all good people, the entire country of us, and bad things don't happen to good people.  Right?

Right???

Well, here we have it:  proof positive that at least one wingnut wants President Bush to remain in office indefinitely beyond the expiration of his term in January 2009.  Markos, I love ya, and I hope to god you are right when you say it can't happen.  But I have to tell you, this article makes my blood freeze in utter horror.  This is the craziest thing I've ever read.  

Hat-tips to my husband, FlashfyreSP for pointing out to me this ungodly insanity, and to Guerilla News Network for dredging up this vile piece of filth and making the liberal/progressive blogosphere aware of it.  You're awesome!  More, TheTick and altscott caught this too, but neither of their diaries caught a lot of attention.  It's a pity, because this really needs wide exposure.  It may get it too, now that it's up on Crooks and Liars.  Follow me below the fold, if you have a stout heart and a cast-iron stomach -- this is going to get fugly.  

This story just caught my eye on the NY Times website, full story here.

A quick link update:  the BBC has the story up, with a handy thumbnail map.  This isn't the same province as Basra, where the Brits are having so much trouble.

This is a quick heads-up, and I will fill in more as I dig up more.  Expect additions, revisions, and further caustic observations.....

(Note:  I've pretty much finished this, unless some other piece of news on this pops up.  I think I've said what I can on this new addition to the Iraq catastrophe.  Thank you for your patience during construction.)

More below the fold.

Yesterday I posted a diary that unnerved those who read it, and scared me even as I was putting it together.  You can read it here.

This evening another piece of the puzzle fell into my lap when I checked the NY Times online.  I really do not like this, and neither will any of you.  More below the jump:

Most of us have been worrying about the state of this country for some time, and not just politically.  Impeachment is only part of it.  Endless diaries and other blogs comment upon the economic malaise experienced and witnessed by most of the citizenry.  Certain aspects of our infrastructure problems have been dissected separately even in this country's mainstream press.  It's worrying, to put it mildly.  

We all see the signs in our daily lives.  The laundry list includes:  unequal income distribution; crumbling infrastructure; deteriorating and unequal public schools; the depressed housing market; the stagnant job market; high rates of personal debt; the sky-high national debt; and far more.  These are the problems:  bridges  and highways constantly under repair, levees that don't hold up in storms, railroads that need maintenance, steam pipes that burst; schools that are underfunded, overworked and understaffed air control tower staff; stagnant wages and an ever-rising cost of living; it just goes on and on and on.  Add insult to injury, we know our tax structure is terribly unequal, weighted to give the uber-wealthy substantial breaks.    

This is really cruel:

The American Red Cross has learned about a new scam targeting military families. This scam takes the form of false information to military families....

Just when I thought my outrage meter was broken....

Let's face it:  the news the last several weeks has been grim and grimmer.  We're continually body-slammed with one scandal after heartbreak after outrage on what seems a daily basis, and there is no end in sight.  We can't get the Democrats in Congress to stand up to the Bush Maladministration bullies, tell the health insurance industry to blow, the auto industry to suck it up, or the energy industry to play by the rules.  We're angry, livid, depressed, and wrung out.

It's times like these when my mother-in-law's penchant for sending silly jokes over e-mail comes in handy:  I've been really, really down lately.  All the news in my life seems bad.  After I read it, I thought -- hey, I bet I'm not the only one who needs a laugh this week.  Hence the sharing.  Here's where you come in:  I think we should all take a moment to collect our favorite political jokes and share them with each other.  If we don't start laughing, we're going to become basket cases in short order.

After a long, hard struggle and decline, my mother died early this morning.

I've been awake for nearly four hours now, trying to sort out how I feel and what I want to say.  Ours was a difficult relationship:  as much as we loved each other, we did not fully understand one another.

It is not necessarily the personal I want to write about this morning, although that is part of it and I can't completely hide it away.  It's more about the last few years of her life, why she suffered so, and what I wish could change in the way we care for the elderly incapacitated.

And more, what I wish could have been for her, and countless others like her who could benefit if stem cell research were further advanced than it is now.

This is a special purpose diary for those interested in the plans to distribute this series, Restoring Our Constitution, to members of Congress.  I will post developments in separate diaries as necessary.

I’ve emailed many of the principals involved, but there are a few contributors for whom I have no contact information, or whose email address bounced.  Hence this update on our plans here.  Issues include the debate on editing prior to distribution, considering the best date for the distribution, and of course the legal issues, such as copyright clearing for those diaries with images and making sure every contributor is willing to allow this type of publication and distribution.  If you are a contributor and did not hear from me today via email, please email me using the address on my page.  I will forward my emails to you.

Details below the fold.

As those who've read the series know, I'm one of the authors in the historical essays section.  After two of these, I feel some sense of, well, not ownership, but of responsibility for the series.  I find that I cannot simply let my participation with this project end there.  More is demanded of us authors:  we need to issue the call to action.  Hence my diary.

But this mere writer and historian needs the help of those better versed in the practical matters of organizing and scheduling.  To those I have a special call -- help me help us.  Read what I've written below, and give me your advice in the comments on how to accomplish the action I propose.

I've been getting updates in my email from CODEPINK for a long time.  They show up at least once a week, often once a day.  Most of the time, there's a petition, or a fund-raising drive to send a peace delegation to Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, etc., or a call for volunteers to travel.  I don't exactly have a lot of money, so I haven't done much besides sign petitions.  

This morning's missive wasn't much different, but what happened after I signed the letter to the UN Security Council was.  There was a list of actions.  One of them is right up our alley.  Follow me below the fold for more:

During my years in graduate school, I had the great good fortune to take a historiography class and a research class under a serious Stuart-era historian.  His focus for the research course was the Stuart "crisis of the aristocracy" and the clash between the Court and Parliament.  Being more interested in trade and empire, I had difficulty really immersing myself in the topic.   But now, given what we are experiencing now, I am very glad I took that course, and, more importantly, kept every single book and article he assigned.  

It is not my purpose today to give a blow-by-blow description of the preconditions to the English Civil War.  But there are enough similarities to the situation we find ourselves in now that I do think some discussion of it is warranted.  As with my diary on Plantagenet era common law development, this is essay is geared towards non-historians.  Follow me below the fold for more:

Disclaimer:  I am not a legal scholar.  Nor am I a medievalist.  But I took enough courses on medieval history while working on my secondary field, early modern Europe, that I've got some idea of the historical context.  I do not expect to get this perfectly right.  I hope that people will use the comments section to expand on points I may gloss over, or otherwise correct deficiencies in this diary.

I am also writing this for those who know very little about medieval and early modern English history, which seems to me to be a reasonable assumption.

Before I announce the winner, a few introductory remarks are in order. I must say the margin between the winner and the nearest runner-up was absolutely colossal, an overwhelming landslide.  Most of the contenders received only 6% of the vote.  This was something I had not expected, but that's quite alright.

Our second-place runners-up, who garnered 12% of the vote with 10 votes total, are Senators Joe Lieberman and Mitch McConnell, for voting to block debate Saturday.  Their commitment to continued death, destruction and despair is such that they are hereby consigned to share the doghouse with the winner of the award until the rotting bird falls off.

Our champion, who garnered fully 35% of the vote, with 29 votes, the recipient and honorary chicken-thieving hound-dog of the Molly Ivins Memorial Chicken Award is...

Thanks to the good folk who found my last diary and gave me their favorites to add to the ones I slated in this race, I have a modest roster of candidates for the Molly Ivins Memorial Chicken Award:

Pssst:  shameless plug to all of Molly’s fans here – please, please rec this up so it stays current for an entire day.  This won’t work otherwise.

Things have been awfully serious around here lately, and we need to make our venting a bit more, well, fun.  Between the trashing of Amanda Marcotte, the Hoekstra/Shadegg memo leak, theyrereal’s "A photograph you'll never forget", the Iran saber-rattling, and the continuing nightmare of Iraq, et cetera et cetera ad nauseum ad infinitum, we need to do the cyber equivalent of putting some gasbag’s mug on a dart board and have at.  So here we go.  I propose a whole new contest:  the Molly Ivins Memorial Chicken Award, given to the biggest boofdah in American political life.

A lot of us remember the Pinochet regime and its nasty practice of "disappearing" critics of that government.  I think a similar situation has begun to emerge in Pakistan, so far on a much smaller scale.  This has been going on for a while, but this is the first time I've seen this reported in a major US newspaper.

You can read the full story in the NY Times here.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirmed Friday that President GW Bush authorized the arrest of the Iranians from their consulate in Irbil, linking it to an order issued several months ago to disrupt Iranian activities in Iraq.  You can read the whole story here:  http://www.nytimes.com/...