The Apotheosis of Mitt Romney

The real reason Romney bowed out of the race
for the Republican nomination.

Evil paste-up by Kvatch
Inspiration from The Frogette

TAGS: Mitt Romney, Gordon Hinckley

Exxon Mobil Practicing Economic Terrorism

British Court Freezes Venezuelan Assets

The Toronto Star printed this AP story yesterday that illustrates the kind of economic imperialism that has become the hallmark of the big multinational corporations.

CARACAS–Venezuela's top oil official accused Exxon Mobil Corp. yesterday of "judicial terrorism," but said court orders won by the oil major do not amount to confiscation of $12 billion (U.S.) in assets.

Exxon Mobil has gone after the assets of the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, in U.S., British and Dutch courts as it challenges the nationalization of a multi-billion-dollar oil project by President Hugo Chavez's government.

A British court last month issued an injunction "freezing" as much as $12 billion in assets.

But Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said: "They don't have any asset frozen. They only have frozen $300 million" in cash through a U.S. court in New York. As for the case in Britain, PDVSA doesn't have "any assets in that jurisdiction that even come close to those sums" of $12 billion, Ramirez said.

He called it a "transitory measure" while PDVSA, the state company, presents its case in New York and London. Exxon Mobil is also seeking international arbitration, which Venezuela has agreed to.

But Ramirez, who is PDVSA's president, said Exxon Mobil "hasn't respected the terms of the arbitration" and its claims in the nationalization dispute "don't even come close to half the sum of $12 billion claimed by them."
[...]
He accused the Texas-based oil major of employing "judicial terrorism" and trying to generate "financial nervousness" around PDVSA.

Court documents show Exxon Mobil has secured an "order of attachment" on about $300 million in cash held by PDVSA. A hearing to confirm the order is set for Feb. 13 in New York. In a Jan. 24 "freezing injunction," a British court said PDVSA "must not remove from England or Wales any of its assets ... up to the value of $12 billion."

There's just a couple of comments I'd like to make about this. One is the acceptance of the idea that if white people live over a resource by dint of their having stolen the land from red people, they have control of that resource. As in say, Texas or Alberta. This principle is not to be extended to brown people, who never own or control a resource even if they've been living over it for millenia. As in say, Iraq.

The other thing is that it's pretty obvious that the big multinationals are getting way too powerful. While we usually associate the term economic imperialism with nation states, it's becoming increasingly clear that the practice has passed into the hands of unelected and unaccountable capitalists. And they're not exactly being coy about it. In fact, Canada's largest oil company is called Imperial Oil. I'd call that pretty blatant.

What is more disturbing is the clear indication that they are now using the court systems and even the military resources of powerful nations like the USA and Britain to impose their will on a world that hasn't the wherewithal to oppose them. And sadly, I don't see that trend reversing itself in the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: (h/t Green Libertarian) This story from xinhua.net (Chinese news service) helps show Exxon's motivation for these actions against the people of Venezuela.

The Exxon-Venezuela dispute has aroused markets concerns that world oil supply may be destabilized.

Prices of light sweet crude for March delivery rose 4 percent, its biggest gains in two months, to settle at 91.77 dollars per barrel at New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday.

In London, Brent North Sea crude for March delivery also saw an up of 3.43 dollars and settled at 91.94 dollars.

That should drive the cost of filling your tank up considerably, and with it Exxon's profit margin.

TAGS: Economic Imperialism, Big Oil, Filthy Oily Slime, Globalization

Saturday, Openly Threading.

Rage Against the Machine: "Sleep Now In the Fire."

Crank it up, children.

Home of the Petty

Land of the Childish

There's been a lot of world class pettiness on display in American politics for a long, long time. Yesterday, I started the day off with a good feeling that maybe, just maybe, some of the pettiness in the political process might be ebbing. By the end of the day, so much pettiness had been blasted through the newscycle that I wound up sitting on my couch in a rage, flailing away at my laptop cursing the likes of Mike Mukasey, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh and a cast of thousands of the pettiest emeffers walking what's left of planet Earth.

It has occurred to me, that this is my own fault. I'm too optimistic. A candidate like Barack Obama, or even Hillary Clinton at times, can tap into that optimism. Occasionally I'll go an hour or two without the bitterness of living in a twisted, dystopian shadow of the America I grew up in, which was itself a shadow of the America that it should have been.

So when I see a news item like this I start to think, maybe this troll Mukasey ain't so bad.

From The Washington Post:

Five years after a gay advocacy group was told that it could no longer use the e-mail, bulletin boards and meeting rooms at the Justice Department, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has reversed that decision and issued a revised equal-employment-opportunity policy barring discrimination against any group.

Mukasey informed leaders of DOJ Pride last week that the department would give it the same rights as all other DOJ employee organizations, said the group's president, Chris Hook. In a statement, Mukasey said the department will "foster an environment in which diversity is valued, understood and sought" and maintain "an environment that's free of discrimination."

DOJ Pride and its 110 members had been barred from holding an annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Month celebration since 2003, when then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told the group that the Bush administration observed an unwritten policy of not sponsoring events without a presidential proclamation, Hook said. The group also was told it could not post notices of general meetings and events on department bulletin boards, he said.

(more)

Sure, Mukasey reversed an incredibly petty move by Ass-croft that was continued by Alberto Gonzales, who remains at large. No big deal, just simple human consideration. A welcome development that caused me to think, maybe this guy's different.

Now don't get me wrong, I never expected him to be any better than Ashcroft or Gonzo when it came to policy. I just thought, maybe he's not a complete asshole.

I was disabused of that notion quickly.

Unconventional Conventionist nailed this down yesterday... He sucks. To that I'll add--he blows. During his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, he testified that he would not investigate waterboarding because the Department previously ruled the program legal.

Wow! That is an outrage! But, by the standards set by the last two Attorneys General, it was right about where you would expect him to be--destroying our lives before hitting the lecture circuit. Holdfast blogger Matt Hamlin Browner wrote that Mukasey's declaration amounted to "a note that should go down as the day in which the Bush administration formalizes its position that the United States should be a country that is subject to the rule of men and not the rule of law." And he's right, except the Bush administration formalizes that position several times already--Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, several other acts, executive orders out the wazoo--we all have our favorite greatest hits of Bush's team killing democracy.

But to add pettiness to assault on the torn up, charred pieces of the Constitution, I capped off my night by reading about how Mukasey is stonewalling Talking Points Memo in retribution for their coverage of the US Attorney purge. Muckrakergate, as The Politico is calling it, was one of the subjects brought up at the hearing. Democratic Representative Hank Johnson had to ask Mukasey whether he was responsible for taking TPM off the DoJ press list. We actually had a hearing where Congress demanded to know from the Nation's top law enforcement officer "are we are a nation of laws or men, and by the way, why'd you monkey with that blog?" Mukasey's a child.

Between the onslaught of disturbing Mukasey stories, Mitt Romney managed to take pettiness to the next, smarmy level with his rationale for getting out of the Presidential race. You see, Romney had to drop out because this is a time of war. According to him, if he and John McCain kept fighting it out it would keep McCain--who Mitt could eventually beat if this process were only about Mitt--from beating Obama or Clinton. If, Romney reasoned, Clinton or Obama were elected, they would embrace communists and terrorists all over the world and that's bad for America, which he loves.

UPDATE: Olbermann covers Romney's gibberish.


Then there's Limbaugh. So petty is this man that he would abandon his own party to support his sworn enemy, Hillary Clinton, so he can spend (what he thinks will be) four year of attacking her. He'll blame Bush's mistakes on the Clintons every day and that will be good for America... somehow. Never before has it been so apparent that these McCain hating, pill-crunching blowhards don't care about anyone but themselves. It's all just a petty little game to them.

TAGS: Rush Limbaugh, Mike Mukasey, Waterboarding, Mitt Romney

See this guy?

See this guy? He's your Attorney General.

And he sucks.

Sucks.

Sucks.

Sucks.

Sucks.

The big reason, which I never actually came face to face to, until today, is that his refusal to actually act like an Attorney General, means that cases of Gitmo, Waterboarding, and nasty activity in the Department of Justice, are now NOT ACTIONABLE by the Courts.

There is no check and balance on the Unitary Executive.

Who'd have thunk it?

TAGS: Dickheads, Erosion of Liberty, Insert Execrable Tag Here

"Semper fi"?

Not hardly. Not if the wounds you suffer are to your heart and to your soul:

Denial in the Corps by Kathy Dobie, from The Nation

Marine Lance Cpl. James Jenkins is buried in the same New Jersey cemetery that he used to run through on his way to high school, stopping at the Eat Good Bakery to get two glazed doughnuts and an orange juice before heading off to class. When his mother, Cynthia Fleming, visits his grave, she looks over the low cemetery wall at not only the bakery but the used-car lot where James used to sell Christmas trees during the winter and the nursing home where he worked every summer and says, “Lord, son, you’re on your own turf.” James, who died at 23, is buried in Greenwood Cemetery; the owners told Cynthia they’re proud to have him there.

During his short career as a Marine, Corporal Jenkins received many commendations recognizing his “intense desire to excel,” “unbridled enthusiasm” and “unswerving devotion to duty.” It was for heroic actions performed during a fifty-five-hour battle with the Mahdi militia in Najaf that Jenkins was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The fighting, which began on the city streets in August 2004 and moved into the Wadi al Salam Cemetery, was ferociously personal. Marines and militiamen were often only yards apart, killing one another at close range. When the battle was over, eight Americans and hundreds of militiamen were dead.

After that tour, his second in Iraq, Jenkins could barely sleep. When he did, the nightmares were horrible. He was plagued by remorse and depression, unable to be intimate with his fiancée, run ragged by an adrenaline surge he couldn’t turn off.

Back at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton the following January, Jenkins took to gambling, or gambling took to him; he became addicted to blackjack and pai gow, a fast-moving card game where you can lose your shirt in a minute. The knife-edge excitement felt comfortingly familiar. Jenkins went into debt, borrowing thousands of dollars from payday loan companies. Busted for writing bad checks, he was locked up in the Camp Pendleton brig that spring pending court-martial. In the months that followed, he was released, locked up and released again. He spoke often of suicide. The Marines never diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When his mother called his command seeking help, Jenkins’s first sergeant, who had not served in Iraq, told Fleming he thought James was using his suicidal feelings to his advantage. “I have 130 Marines to worry about other than your son,” she recalls the sergeant saying. When his command decided to lock him up a third time, James Jenkins ran.

On September 28, 2005, eight months after returning from Iraq, Jenkins found himself cornered in the Oceanside apartment he shared with his fiancée. A deputy sheriff pounded on the front door, while a US Marshal covered the back. The young man with the “intense desire to excel” decided he could not go back to the brig or get an other-than-honorable discharge. He would not shame his family or have his hard-won achievements and his pride stripped away. And he was in pain. “He said, ‘I can’t even shut my eyes,’” his mother says, recalling one of his calls home that month. “He said, ‘I killed 213 people, Mom.’ He said, ‘I can’t live like this.’ He said, ‘Everything I worked for is down the drain,’ and he was crying like a baby.” While the officers waited for his fiancée to open the door, Jenkins shot himself in the right temple…

The rest here. Prepare to be angry if you read it. Really. Angry. The outrage I felt after reading this piece made my heart race. What had been a good day was spoiled. The excitement I had felt on Tuesday over the primaries evaporated into a seething rage. I felt sick. Physically sick. It got my acid reflux all in a mess.

As I mentioned a while back, I have a former student who is a Marine, who is due to ship out to Iraq this month. And we just found out that another former student has just signed up. With the Marines.

When soldiers returned from the Civil War with what we know call post-traumatic stress disorder, their condition was referred to as “melancholy.” After the First World War, the doctors called it “shell shock,” and they knew it was caused by the horrors of war in the trenches. Some of those soldiers actually received some forms of treatment. World War Two? “Battle fatigue.” Many of that generation just dealt with their nightmares and flashbacks on their own, through sleepless nights, ruined marriages, alcoholism. It was only after Vietnam, with advances in psychiatry and psychology and an enlightened culture that physicians finally realized that what happens to those who serve in combat is a disorder, a mental illness, something that needs to be diagnosed and treated. Those who suffer from this condition are ill: they are sick. They are patients, not “slackers” or “malingerers” or “losers.”

It is shameful - if not criminal - that the Marine Corps, which so prides itself on espirit de corps and teamwork, which sells itself to young people as being the best of the best, the “few and the proud,” can treat its own members in such a disgracefully shabby fashion. They have turned back the clock over one hundred years. Even those who tried to nurse Johnny Reb and Billy Yank back to health were more compassionate and empathetic than the callous, cold, heartless excuses for human beings who so wrongly dealt with the young men in this article.

Rather than wasting time looking into which teams might have "illegally" videotaped the practice sessions of what other teams in the National Football League, or which over-paid, over-exposed baseball players might have used “performance-enhancing” drugs, the United States Senate ought to be investigating how America’s elite fighting force mistreats and abuses its own troops. How it ignores them at best, misdiagnoses them and cuts them off from benefits as a matter of routine policy, and, at worst, leaves them adrift, abandoning them to lives of isolation, addiction, and madness, to die at their own hands, all the while denying any complicity or responsibility for their fate. And then disrespecting their families when they have the temerity to try to get to the truth.

Read this article. But don't just be angry about it. Print out a copy. Photocopy that copy. Share this. Leave it around, in doctors' offices, on the seat on the bus, in the pew at your house of worship. And be sure to show it to any young person you might know who might be considering enlisting in the military.

Show them the truth. “Always faithful”? Not to those who serve.

They just get thrown out with the trash.

Super Tuesday Open Thread

Does it really matter?
Or is all just a sham
designed to make you think
you still live in a democracy?

TAGS: Super Tuesday, Open Thread

Sham on You

Whither Wither Democracy?

This item from the BBC strikes me as being painfully ironic.

The US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out of political expediency, Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.

Allowing autocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned.
[..]
HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it had become too easy for autocrats to get away with mounting a sham democracy "because too many Western governments insist on elections and leave it at that".

"They don't press governments on the key human rights issues that make democracy function - a free press, peaceful assembly, and a functioning civil society that can really challenge power," he added.
[..]
"It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or commercial ally," Mr Roth said.

The ironic pain comes from the blatantly obvious fact that the most dubious elections of all have occurred right in the United States. The 2000 sElection of Bush the Lesser by a partisan and biased Supreme Court was a travesty. Four years later the more sophisticated but no less devastating electronic vote fraud in Ohio reinstalled the moron who would be king, to go on and add to the considerable damage he had inflicted on the nation. Anyone who thinks things are going to be better this time around should read this story from TPMMuckraker. I declare shenanigans!

I shouldn't need to elaborate - places like Bradblog and Black Box Voting have detailed the demise of democracy to death, for all the good it's done. I will sketch out just a few of the major ways that the electoral process has been thwarted in the last couple of elections:

1) Disenfranchisement before the fact: this includes practices such as caging lists and the generation of lists declaring people ineligible to vote because of criminal records that didn't exist. This latter instance was well documented after the fact in Florida, 2000, but too late to do any good as the result by then was a fait accompli.

2) Disenfranchisement after the fact: in 2000 this consisted of things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots. By 2004 it was implemented through electronic means, whereby your vote could be excluded or even flipped to the other side by the alteration of a memory card, taking only a few keystrokes.

3) False flag candidacies: Pssst. Hey, buddy! You want to ensure a Republican victory in an election? Just pour enough money into the Democratic primary to install a corporatist puppet on the other side. If you have an R - Republican running against a D - Republican, the Republicans will win every time. Do you think LIE-berman, Feinstein and Schumer are the only wolves dressed in sheep's clothing in Washington? Think again. It's not so hard to arrange things so the question becomes "will that be plastic, or plastic?" In fact it's a lot cheaper if you're an unprincipled Republican to eliminate your opposition in the Democratic primary than it is to defeat him in the general election.

4) Bulldozer tactics: Is there a particularly vocal opponent giving you trouble in Congress? Simply outspend him or her 5 to 1, and steal his seat. That's what's happening to Dennis Kucinich right now. Is it any wonder so many people choose not to participate when any good candidates are eliminated long before the ballot is even drawn up?

Here's another list, of a different kind altogether, from Mark Crispin Miller:

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy:

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn’t just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don’t have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don’t yet even know if the election was legitimate, they de-legitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of “sore losers.”

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don’t.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID’s at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
We’re under surveillance everywhere else, so why not?

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday,
requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment--and disenfranchisement--for all repeat offenders.
“Three strikes and you’re out” would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.

Not to diminish the value of Mr. Miller's list, but one must ask, "what government is going to implement these changes?" I see a catch-22 here, a 'you can't get there from here' barrier that will not easily be surmounted. You're not going to get these kind of reforms until you change the entire body politic in Washington. You're not going to get a new body politic without the reforms. If you go to this post at OpEd news you'll see that a lot of the commenters feel the same way.

A more sobering reflection comes with the assumption that the November elections will be above board and the results the best we can reasonably hope for under the current conditions. (which for me would mean Obama in the White House, and a Democratic supermajority in both houses.) My point is that even the best case scenario under current conditions would be far from adequate to restore the democracy that used to exist in America. So I've decided to take a little un-scientific survey that you can answer in comments. There's no format, no multiple choices, no boxes to fill in - very open ended and unruly, the way I like things. Here is the one multi-part question.

Given the very best outcome that you can currently imagine for the 2008 elections, (feel free to name the winning candidate and his or her running mate, even cabinet members if that floats your boat)

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT:

1. The US will withdraw its troops from Iraq
2. Prisoners currently in Guantanamo and elsewhere will either be released or tried with the due process that one would expect in any civilized country
   
3. The USA PATRIOT Act will be repealed
4. The Military Commissions Act will be repealed and habeas corpus restored
   
5. The Protect America Act will be repealed
   
6. Serious crimes committed by the current administration will be prosecuted fully, and guilty parties penalized without pardons or commutations of sentence
   
7. Crimes committed by corporate entities enabled by the current administration will be prosecuted
8. Even one of the worthy proposals made by Mark Crispin Miller will be enacted
9. Anything I missed? Add your own in comments and I will put it up here too.
   

Of course it's a given that there are some things that desperately need to be restored for democracy to work, but can't be without a second American Revolution. The partisan Supreme Court that the last two Bushes have left as their legacy for example. The pillaging of the economy by the multinationals. I'm sure you can think of a few more.

The worst case scenario is of course terrifying: the installation of a worldwide system of corporate fascism under the guise of globalisation. What's really scary is that the best case scenario doesn't look that good either.

TAGS: 2008 Elections, Electoral Reform, Best Case Scenario, Future Watch

Stripped Safe

Once upon a time, in Stark County, Ohio, a woman was assaulted by a family member, and was injured badly enough that her cousin called 911 for help. Help arrived. The police officer mistook the victim for the perpetrator, slammed her around a bit, and hauled her away to jail. For some mysterious reason, the patrol car video camera was not turned on during this arrest. The injured assault victim was then taken to a jail cell, where she was held down, at one point, by no less than seven individuals, who forcibly removed every shred of her clothing. They then left her naked in a jail cell for the next six hours. She was not allowed to use the telephone. She was not treated for the injuries which had prompted her cousin to call for help on her behalf in the first place.

It's not a surprise that it is against policy for a male deputy to strip search a female in custody, and in this case, men were not only present, but clearly participated in the removal of the woman's clothing. That seven individuals were simultaneously involved in the stripping of this 125 pound woman seem to suggest a certain eagerness on the part of those engaged in forcibly separating the woman from her clothes. I believe the quote from the Sherrif's office characterizing the incident was: "by the book." They simply declared that what had occurred was not, in fact, a strip search. It was something else, and that made it A-OK.

Alright, I find myself horrified by the footage, which the victim and her husband released, and now resides on YouTube. (See the C&L post with video, and also this.) I keep asking myself why I'm so horrified, given that our government does things in the name of security that horrify me daily.

I might be horrified because this incident seems to trace back to a taser happy police force that has killed nearly 300 people, 5 people last month alone. And, I suppose the tasing tide can be described as a predictable outcome in a society that allows a powerful politician who had been consuming alcohol to shoot someone in the face at dusk, wait until the next day before allowing the police to question him, later having the victim who was shot in the face and subsequently had a heart attack apologize publicly.

Gunshot wound at dusk
Smell of beer and wife not his
Fresh blood spills to earth

This, I think, is what happens when a society allows a man who tortured animals as a child and delights in sentencing people to death as an adult, to control the world's largest standing army. I do see a link between the war and occupation in Iraq and the way in which the woman in this case was "handled" by the Sherrif's Department.

That could be the reason I am so horrified, but I don't think it is. I think I am horrified because this case is so highly symbolic to me. When I watch what occurred on video, I feel this woman has been violated. And I feel that I have been violated. In fact, I have been violated. We all have been. By the present administration. Our rights and protections have been stripped away from us as this woman's clothes have been stripped from her, though I will argue with much less complaint; we gave up our rights and protections rather a bit more quietly.

The very people whom we count on to protect us did this to us, after we had been assaulted and were vulnerable--after 9/11. They have been stripping away our Individual rights; our right to Due Process; our First Amendment freedoms: Speech, the Press, Religion, Assembly and Association; our Fourth Amendment right to protection from illegal Search and Seizure; and our Sixth Amendment right to Counsel. And they took away these rights and protections, and continue to do so, "to keep us safe."

Guess what? That's the same argument the Sherrif's Office used to explain why they forcibly stripped the assault victim held in custody. Unable to call it a "strip search" because of the man hands involved, they said it wasn't a strip search. They said it was, "for her own safety." They did it to "protect her."

So the people who were supposed to protect her when she was hurt, turned on her, stripped her bare, and left her naked in a jail cell for her own safety.

That may be the reason I am so horrified. Because here, in the twilight of Democracy, that is what I feel the Bush administration is doing to us all.

Torn Liberty, originally uploaded by Mr. Guybrarian.

TAGS: Strip Search, Police Brutality, Rights and Protections, Stark Ohio, Twilight of Democracy

Super Sunday Open Thread

They Might Be Giants: "The Shadow Government."

There's a hint there as to where my loyalties lie in today's "big game." My late father is spinning in his grave, but I simply cannot root for the Patriots. As an Eagles fan, the idea of rooting for a New Yawk team really sticks in my esophagus. But. They are just too much. Too much hype. Too arrogant. Too cocky. Too much swagger. And they cheat. They remind me too much of You Know Who.

In fact, right now, they really are "America's Team," in so many (not-so-great) ways.

And here's a shout-out to my nephew J., who is 21 today. Between that to celebrate and the game, the Agitator house will be rockin.'

Angry Saturday Open Thread

Neil Young: "Flags of Freedom."

Dedicated to PFC J.O., U.S.M.C., age 19, deploying to Iraq later this month.

May God be with you and watch over you. Come home safe, and soon.

Across the Universe Day Open Thread

It's Across the Universe day on Monday (I thought it was today). NASA is transmitting the song, literally, across the universe Monday night at 7pm. Join in. Details here at AcrosstheUniverseDay.Com.

The song has been covered many times. Here's the original:



And some other versions for your perusal.
Rufus Wainwright - Across The Universe.
Fiona Apple - Across The Universe.
Kierstenmh - Across the Universe.
Laibach - Across the Universe.
Roger Waters - Across The Universe.
Inigo Byrne - Across the Universe.

And finally various Artists including Bono, Brian Wilson, Norah Jones, Steve Tyler, Alicia Keys, Slash, Stevie Wonder... - Across the Universe.


TAGS: The Beatles, NASA, "Across the Universe", Astronomy