with friends like george...
when asked about enron and kenneth lay, george just turned and walked away.
that's some pret-ty strong leadership right there, folks.
July 09, 2004
February 24, 2004
george, george, george
January 23, 2004
it's all so very clear
all of a sudden i get it! the economy's not in bad shape because of congress and the president; it's in bad shape because the members of the press won't eat barbecue!
an excerpt from remarks bush made to the press pool at a restaurant stop in new mexico:
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.
Q Mr. President, how are you?
THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.
Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.
THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch -- what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?
[...]
THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?
Q But Mr. President --
THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?
Q Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?
Q Ribs.
THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.
[...]
THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?
Q An answer.
Q Can we buy some questions?
THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people -- they make a lot of money and they're not going to spend much. I'm not saying they're overpaid, they're just not spending any money.
thank you, press pool, for ruining america and depriving hardworking ribmongers of the chance to earn a decent living wage.
October 19, 2003
if you can't say something nice...
...go stand in this cage over here.
you might expect protestors to be kept well away from the president when he visits the philippines, known to be kind of, well, iffy in the terrorist department...
Oct. 18, 2003 | MANILA -- Thousands of university students and other activists marched Saturday to protest President Bush's visit to this city already tense over security concerns.
Up to 4,000 protesters burned U.S. flags and an effigy of a pirate-dressed Bush as his motorcade sped by on the opposite side of the highway en route to the House of Representatives, where he addressed a joint session of Congress.
Waving anti-U.S. placards and streamers saying "Ban Bush" and "Bush No. 1 terrorist," the protesters were cordoned off by anti-riot police and Philippine marines.
...but i wouldn't have expected it in america:Up to 4,000 protesters burned U.S. flags and an effigy of a pirate-dressed Bush as his motorcade sped by on the opposite side of the highway en route to the House of Representatives, where he addressed a joint session of Congress.
Waving anti-U.S. placards and streamers saying "Ban Bush" and "Bush No. 1 terrorist," the protesters were cordoned off by anti-riot police and Philippine marines.
Security forces effectively blocked Bush's view of the demonstrators by lining up tall army trucks along the middle of the road. Some protesters stood on top of the vehicles to raise their streamers.
I’ve run into these so-called free speech zones several times in the last few years. The first time was in July of 2001, when Vice President Cheney delivered a major energy policy speech at the Community College of Allegheny County. I arrived with my sign only to discover that protesters were being herded into a remote “free speech zone” located some distance from where Cheney and his press entourage would enter. I could see pro-Bush and pro-Cheney signs visible beyond the line of police...
read bill neel's entire statement. free speech zone, indeed.
As I walked in that direction, I passed a community park and baseball field enclosed by a six-foot high chain link fence. Inside the fenced area was a group of people with signs protesting various aspects of Bush policies. At the gates to the park were armed police officers. The protesters were standing against the fence with their hands grasping the fencing. On the outside, people carrying pro-Bush signs stood on the sidewalk or proceeded unchallenged toward the rally site.
The captive protesters, noting my sign, told me I would have to join them inside the cage...I decided to stay outside the fence and display my sign...
Within a short time, two uniformed Allegheny police officers approached me and demanded that I enter the “designated free speech zone.” I quietly refused, stating that a designated free-speech zone is a contradiction in terms and that the whole country is a free speech zone.
October 08, 2003
morning in america
god, i go to sleep for eight hours and wake up with arnold schwarzenegger as the governor of california. can i not turn my back for five seconds?
i'm pretty mad about this, but my rage is held mostly in check by my astonishment — would you just look at the shovelface on maria schwarzenegger (as one news source was smugly calling her last night)?
September 29, 2003
i always love the cheap laugh
from a white house press briefing about the white house's leak of the identity of a cia operative:
McCLELLAN: [Rove] wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.
(thanks, talking points and paul. and thank you, scott mcclellan, for so ably filling the odoriferous shoes of ari fleischer.)
QUESTION: How does he know that?
QUESTION: How does he know that?
McCLELLAN: The President knows.
QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know?
August 29, 2003
word play of the day
my new favorite anagram:
(thanks to the mysteriously silent kaley.)
August 07, 2003
today's sign that the end times approach
the george w. bush action figure.
June 13, 2003
do they make 'em with training wheels?
turns out you can fall off a segway.
May 24, 2003
so that's how they do it.
from abcnews.com's the note:
Q. What determines how many times Karl Rove's name appears in The Note on any given day?
A. Rove, as Dean Lemann recently pointed out, is everywhere, and we could insert him into every section, every day, without any fall-off in editorial quality.
The number of Rove mentions, however, is determined by one particular Googling monkey, in whose cage we have placed a Pop-o-matic. Whatever number the die is on when we get in each morning is the number we use.
May 14, 2003
we wuz lied to
molly ivins on the u.s.'s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in iraq:
But the weirdest media reaction of all is to the ongoing nonappearance of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More and more stories quoting ever-unnamed administration officials appear saying the administration would be "amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium" and that finding large volumes of chemical or biological material is "unlikely."
Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation.
Why do you think people were so angry at Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin? At Richard Nixon over the "secret war" in Cambodia? Even at Bill Clinton over the less-cosmic matter of whether he had sex with "that woman." If it makes no difference whether the government lied, why is Friedman a journalist? Why does journalism exist at all?
Come on, think about this. The Bush administration apparently feels entitled to take actions punishing close old friends, including Mexico and Canada -- not to mention the Europeans -- for not siding with us in a war we may have lied about? This is not going to sit well with the rest of the world.
from your mouth, molly...
April 11, 2003
igor and the boys
paul ford writes in ftrain:
Do Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Cheney have coffins in the basement of the White House where they sleep during the day? Is Ari Fleischer secretly their hunchbacked errand boy? How are these people formed? What combination of parenting, and weather, and genetics, and ideology makes them so different from me, gives them the hunger to see their visions turned into action, into dollars and blood?
April 05, 2003
cakewalk, my ass
finally, a smart article discussing opposition to the war in iraq. it's been hard to find thoughtful commentary that doesn't immediately undermine itself with outrageous sanctimony or ivory tower idealism. joan walsh succeeds in salon: "I hope for a U.S. victory with minimum bloodshed and maximum freedom for the Iraqi people. But I also want the cakewalk conservatives to pay for their hubris politically."
So far the loudest establishment voices criticizing the Bush administration's war plan belong to retired generals, unnamed active military leaders and former Republican officials, while most prominent Democrats either proclaim their support, or remain silent.
the full article is here.
[...]
Why are so many war critics flummoxed by talking about the war? Isn't it possible to critique the president without giving aid and comfort to the enemy? And is pointing out the effort's shortcomings the same as glorying in them? I've been struggling with these questions since the war began. I'm not an antiwar Democrat; I'm just anti-this war, at this time. I think Saddam is a bigger menace than most of the left seems to; I think his flouting U.N. resolutions merited a tough international response; I thought the world was on its way to crafting one when the Bush administration pulled the plug on diplomacy.
[...]
Retired generals have blasted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for an unrealistic war plan that emphasized technology and air superiority and minimized the role of ground troops backed by heavy artillery. [...] Yet I won't be able to enjoy the spectacle of Rumsfeld being proven wrong, if the battle for Baghdad is bloodier than expected, and the war drags on -- though the news Thursday made victory seem closer than it did earlier in the week. After all, such miscalculations aren't just a political blunder; they may cost American and Iraqi lives.
[...]
Those of us who argued for more time, to bring more of our allies onboard, if not the U.N., did so not because we're Saddam lovers or Bush haters or we're secretly French; it was because the difficulty of winning the war, securing the peace and rebuilding Iraq required an international coalition. As one moderate Egyptian told the Times' Thomas Friedman (who was himself a little too sanguine about the incredible gamble with human life that this invasion represented): "Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success."
It's not too late to make the Iraqis smile, of course. But it is too late to take back the pictures, broadcast around an already hostile world, of dead Iraqi children, grieving parents, wounded civilians and the comparatively lucky Iraqis who are merely having to drink sewage-tainted water and scavenge for food, due to delays in humanitarian relief. And let's be honest: Making Iraqis smile, even belatedly, is a much tougher job than it would have been had this invasion been backed by the U.N., or at least by a more genuine "coalition of the willing," in which more partners were doing the tough work of bringing humanitarian aid to Iraq even as American forces did the lion's share of the fighting.
The anti-Saddam alliance built by the White House -- which militarily consists almost entirely of the U.S. and Britain, with a small number of Australians and a handful of Poles -- would be comical if its impact weren't so tragic. In 1991, for the first Gulf War, Bush's father amassed a coalition of 32 nations that sent thousands of troops and committed $70 billion in aid; this time around most leaders of the 40-something countries supposedly backing Bush did little more than affix their names to a "Best of luck with the war!" greeting card. [...] Bush and Rumsfeld are dissembling when they say this coalition is larger than the one assembled in '91, and they deserve to be called on it every time they say it.
A poll last week found that a majority of Americans think Bush didn't tell the truth about the cost of the war, either in fiscal terms or in terms of the loss of human life, and I thought once again how silly polling is: The fact that Bush didn't tell the truth about this war and its costs is not a matter of opinion, it's fact, and he should pay for it.
[...]
So what do opponents of the war, and the president's policy in prosecuting it, do now? I can't support Kucinich's call to stop the fighting immediately; it would only let Saddam's regime come in and crush those who've risen up against him, and submit the country to further terror and chaos. On the other hand, I think Rumsfeld's sneering insistence that a cease-fire is completely off the table is frightening: Should the battle of Baghdad bog down, should there be a reasonable chance to resume diplomatic efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't we stop the killing and talk about it? Democrats should be ready to call for that if there's evidence there's still a diplomatic solution to this tragedy.
April 04, 2003
"casey at the bat" it ain't
once in a generation, a public figure unleashes a bolt of creative brilliance that leaves a nation staggered.
okay, twice, if we're counting john ashcroft's stirring anthem, "let the eagle soar" (and we are).
ladies and gentlemen, i give you the poetry of donald rumsfeld.
Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing
March 26, 2003
ladies and gentlemen, ari fleischer.
in salon:
Cheney even went on to throw out the possibility that Baghdad would fall without any fighting. "I can't say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad," he said. "We have to be prepared for that possibility."
Asked about Cheney's rather optimistic remarks on Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that "the vice president said what he said because he had reason -- good reason -- to say it."
Does that mean that the White House still thinks that the Republican Guard will abandon ship?
"I assure you, the vice president does not say things lightly," Fleischer said. "So when the vice president says something like that, he has good reason to say it, and to think it and, therefore, to say it."
Ah.
March 25, 2003
culture clash
from the guardian:
A few miles from the bridge to the south lie the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, founded 8,000 years ago, the birth place of Abraham and a flourishing metropolis at a time when the inhabitants of north-west Europe were still walking round in animal skins.
Sgt Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, passed it on his way north, but he never knew it was there.
"I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant," he said. "These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."
it's the goddamn cradle of civilization. you'd think they'd at least have a taco bell.
March 24, 2003
oh, so that's why i can't sleep.
in case you need a diversion from being shocked and awed, consider this list of things that are scarier than saddam hussein.
March 17, 2003
you want fries with that?
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU IMBECILES THINKING? THIS IS THE ONE OF THE MOST MORONIC ATTEMPTS AT PATRIOTIC CORRECTNESS I HAVE EVER SEEN! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES, YOU IGNORANT, CONTEMPTUOUS, XENOPHOBIC WASTRELS. Thank you.
— Democratic Underground on the "freedom fries" fiasco
February 28, 2003
no matter how politely it knocks
here's a different spin on some of the icons used at the department of homeland security's terrorism readiness site. some highlights, if you will:
 | in the event of a terrorist attack, best buy will unveil its TERRORIFIC SUPER SALE! |
 | if you think about chemicals long enough, they'll appear. don't think about chemicals. |
 | 12:15, 12:20, 12:25. all good times to think about your wasted materialistic life before you die. |
 | walk blindly into a midget's home. |
 | your phone may be a licensed physician. |
 | you will be bombed at 5:12 today. just saying. |
 | consider moving to one of the solar system's outer planets. |
 | do not open the door for radiation, no matter how politely it knocks. |
 | deny the satanic mutterings of the window. |
 | in the event of an emergency your filing cabinets will become intimidating. do not file or organize for they are tall and angry. |
February 27, 2003
nice pants, mr. president. too bad they're on fire...
i figured it out!
i finally came up with the one unimpeachable reason that i oppose war with iraq. now, i am not a pundit of any stripe. i am not as well informed as some, and i'm not as riled up, one way or another, as most. i'm not even as hard-core liberal as you (paul robichaux, this means you) might think. so it took me some time trying to see the other side, trying to overcome the shadings of the so-called liberal media, to get down to brass tacks with my gut resistance. and its tasty little kernel is this:
ari fleischer lies so extravagantly that i'm surprised whatever god may be doesn't set his hair on fire. donald rumsfeld lies and chuckles good-naturedly as he does it. the entire lot of them: liars, damned liars. i don't believe them about what bush eats for lunch. how can i believe them when lives are at stake?
don't get me wrong. i'm well aware that politicians lie. it's a job requirement. and i'm well aware that there are certain issues pertaining to national security that should be concealed. you don't have to tell me everything (though i gotta tell you, boy george, it looks a little shady when you start slamming doors before anyone's even knocked on 'em). all i ask, if you want my support, is that you not be quite so obvious, quite so brazen in your falsehoods. you work for me, so how about not fudging your timecard?
i don't want to rant. (no, really.) but the question that keeps poking the back of my brain with hot little needles is this: if i couldn't believe you about little things, why should i believe you about the big ones?
February 19, 2003
found object: dust off that resumé
February 18, 2003
signs of the times
here's a rundown of some signs seen at saturday's protest march in new york. my personal favorites:
FREEZING MY ASS OFF FOR PEACE
war is tacky, darling
no blood for morons
somewhere in texas a village is missing its idiot.
February 15, 2003
and they say journalism is dead
 | if there's one thing all new yorkers past and present know, it's that we can always count on the new york post to offer a well-reasoned, balanced account of the daily news. |
February 13, 2003
i am wearing orange socks...
i told paul the other night that it was nice to know what the terror alert color was -- it helps me match my wardrobe appropriately, like garanimals*.
he thought for a second and said, "no...more like terranimals."
* the cool kids in grade school had those. ah, but we wore toughskins, and they have made me the fashion plate i am today.
February 11, 2003
pop quiz
forwarded to me:
Here's a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed
since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:
| China 1945-46 Korea 1950-53 China 1950-53 Guatemala 1954 Indonesia 1958 Cuba 1959-60 Guatemala 1960 Congo 1964 Peru 1965 Laos 1964-73 Vietnam 1961-73 | Cambodia 1969-70 Guatemala 1967-69 Grenada 1983 Libya 1986 El Salvador 1980s Nicaragua 1980s Panama 1989 Iraq 1991-99 Sudan 1998 Afghanistan 1998 Yugoslavia 1999 |
Q: In how many of these instances did a democratic
government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct
result? Choose one of the following:
(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1
February 10, 2003
i can't believe they even let this guy drive a car.
i just heard a clip of president jackass on the radio. he was speaking at a conference of religious broadcasters (my tax dollars at work, thankyouverymuch), and he began one incoherent paragraph by saying, "...if war is forced upon us..."
forced upon us? 'scuse me if i'm asking an indelicate question, but exactly whose idea was this to begin with?
don't say it was the iraqis', either, and that if they hadn't been misbehaving we wouldn't need to go in and smack them. that's like saying your six-year-old brother made you hit him. real mature, boy george.
February 06, 2003
straight from the horse's ass
i'm pretty well convinced that it's my short attention span that's responsible for the current state of american politics. i try to stay focused but, my god, who can listen to this stuff without wanting to jump off a bridge? and these people, they do things while we're not looking, like, you know, move into the white house and start playing with guns.
first, colin powell's presentation at the united nations. i am convinced, and have been for quite some time, that saddam hussein does not play well with others. i remain unconvinced, though, that he needs to removed now and at the toddler-like behest of the u.s. absent a deliberate act of provocation. (does violating u.n. resolutions constitute sufficient provocation? don't know; ask israel.)
now we can argue till the cows come home about whether iraq poses an imminent threat to u.s. security and needs to be ground under our boot heel without delay. my gut says no. of course, my gut is occasionally quite ill-informed due to the little attention problem i mentioned above -- i haven't received the full briefing on iraq. apparently i'm not alone in that. jonathan tucker, a former u.n. biological weapons inspector in iraq, wrote in salon:
Another troubling subtext of the presentation was that the U.S. government possessed intelligence -- for example, the satellite images of decontamination trucks carting away prohibited materials from weapons sites -- that would have been of great value to the inspectors had it been made available. I noticed that Hans Blix often appeared extremely angry and I think that might have been the reason -- not only that Iraq was pulling the wool over his eyes, but that the U.S. had actionable intelligence while the inspectors were in the country and did not make it available. I think this was because there was resistance from the intelligence community to declassify information and strong elements of the administration that did not want inspections to succeed -- the hawks who saw the inspections as a sideshow.
(you can read the full article here if you don't mind a few ads.)
moving on to superficial concerns, which are, alas, my specialty, what about covering guernica outside the security council? i am hugely amused to read the various interpretations of this. i like this one best:
"It's only temporary. We're only doing this until the cameras leave," said Abdellatif Kabbaj, the organization's media liaison.[...]Mr. Kabbaj amplified thus: "We had a problem with, you know, the horse." It was, of course, a camera crew that noticed that anyone who stood at the U.N. microphone would be photographed next to the backside of a rearing horse.
February 03, 2003
state of the union address
five-word review of the sotu address:
missed it; intentionally, blessedly incommunicado.
January 27, 2003
a long tradition of vegetables
bumper sticker seen at the grocery store today:
LAWN ORNAMENT
January 24, 2003
and there was much rejoicing
jerry thacker, flagrant 'phobe and one of bush's appointees to serve on an hiv/aids panel, has withdrawn his name from consideration after the media reported his extreme position on homosexuality.
thacker says his remarks have been misconstrued, and that he is not anti-gay. i'd say he has a lot of nerve to make that claim after calling aids a "gay plague," calling homosexual behavior "evil and disgusting," and referring to homosexuality as a "sinful deathstyle." real freakin' christian, eh?
business as usual continues, and furious backpedaling ensues, with ari "his lips are moving" fleischer claiming that thacker's views are "far, far removed from what the president believes." hey, ari, if that's so, if bush doesn't support thacker's views, then how did thacker get nominated for the panel in the first place?
January 23, 2003
new get your war on
this panel packs a wallop.
full page at http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war18.html. warning: swear words and enough anti-bush sentiment to get you shipped down to gitmo just for lookin'.