A Rape Question

Question: How many extra votes would Obama get from independents, women, minorities, Northerners, and people who appreciate balls, if he charged the Republicans in the Virginia legislature with conspiracy to commit mass rape?

Bonus Question: How many more people would learn about what the Virginia legislature has done who would not have otherwise known?

Bonus Question 2: Would Obama be able to handle the hellstorm of feces that would descend on Washington from across the Potomac, as millions of angry white men don their grand- grand- grand-pappies Civil War rags, KKK robes, and suicide vests, slowly mount their arthritic, diabetic, and otherwise-addled frames atop their noble Medicare HoverRounds, conceal their personal arsenals of automatic weapons in the folds of their skin, and ride, ride, ride to Washington, to the house of the Devil himself, on a horrible wave of mutilation!?

Discuss.

You are a terrorist suspect. I am on to you.

A paragraph from Dana Priest's investigative series "Top Secret America":

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

Wow. The blogosphere has already commented 10 times over about the redundancy, waste, abuse and corruption at the heart of Amurica's national security horror show. (Most of which was said before this new WashPo investigation.) So I will simply republish this snippet of what we already knew/know and ask the question: How many terrorist communiques have you produced? And don't play dumb! The article said that the NSA collects 1.7 billion per day. That means that about 25% of the world population is doing something terroristy every day. So again, what the fuck have you people been up to?

Suck it, Hummer! The BP Oil spill only gets ZERO miles per 400,000 gallons -- per day!

From the AP:

BP officials previously said they believed the burner system could incinerate anywhere from 210,000 gallons of oil to 420,000 gallons of oil daily once it's fully operational. Work to optimize the new system was still ongoing, and the company did not say how much oil it has burned so far.

9/11? What 9/11?

The Afghan War is now officially about the fuckin' lucre. We will never leave now.

update: Well, I've since learned (see here, and links therin) that the "discovery" of 1 trillion in mineral wealth beneath Afghanistan is not quite so fresh and its importance to the Afghan economy has been exaggerated. Mining companies need an easy way to get the loot out of the country, after all.

Whatevs. Judging by the feverish manner with which the story "broke", I'd say the Pentagon is angling for another justification for war. Afghans are fucked five ways from Tuesday.

word of the day

pornoseptuagenarian - A prostitute who is in the age range of 70 to 79 years old.

footprints of wingnuttery

Just saw a Vanguard documentary on the Ugandan anti-gay climate at the time that the Ugandans were considering a bill which would have punished gay people with life-imprisonment or death. It was fucked up. I remember the row it created. Rick Warren had to issue a condemnation of the Ugandan bill because the fuckwit was part of a cretinous milieu of wingnuttery that has descended on Africa recently. The American Right has come to Africa under the pretenses of missionary work and fighting HIV. But what they are really doing is spreading right-wing ideology. The main dude spreading the hate, fiery evangelical Pastor Ssempa, said two things that drew my immediate attention: "liberal media" and "George Soros." Now who do you think taught the goodly pastor about the twin terrors of the liberal media and George Soros? Probably not Jesus.

a crisis of probability is not a crisis

So I just heard a bloggingheads.tv discussion between David Frum and Glenn Greenwald. If you want to know what David Frum is thinking now, or how a reasoned discussion between liberals and conservatives is conducted, then I recommend it. What prompted this posting is something Frum said at the end of the discussion about bad things that leaders do during crises. Greenwald tried to get Frum to say whether he believed presidents ought to be able to break the law and be immune from the criminal justice system, but Frum evaded. In that back-and-forth, Frum said, "Bush may have done some things that ... everybody would have thought before [9/11?] were illegal ... that a lot of people think were immoral, and we don't do them anymore, the crisis has passed, the country has found a new footing." I'd like to focus on the "crisis has passed" part.

What I'm gonna say about this crisis of terrorism might sound a little neocon-ish, but to paraphrase one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, "I'm gonna bring you to Mordor and take you right back to the Shire, so stay with me!" I don't think the crisis has passed at all. Frum is saying what everyone else is saying, but everyone else does not know what the hell they are talking about. I think that the probability of a major, 1000-plus-casualty terrorist attack occurring in September, 2001 was similar to the probability of one occurring today. Of course, the probability was greater in September, 2001 because Richard Clark and other Clinton officials with knowledge of bin Laden's activities were warning the shit out of Bush that something would likely happen and Bush was sitting on his ass. But accounting for that major exception, the probability of calamity is the same today. I can say this because there is almost no data with which to calculate the probability of foreign terrorist attacks. This is up for some debate, because the definition of terrorism is usually in debate, but there have been only two relatively recent foreign terrorist attacks in the U.S. in which people have died: the first and second WTC attacks. Given those data, one could reasonably say that a U.S. citizen's probability of dying in a terrorist attack is ill-defined, but most likely the probability is vanishingly small. This near-zero probability existed in the eighties, the nineties, and the oughts, and it will probably continue to exist forever -- until someone blows up the universe.

My simple conclusion is this: It would be nice if -- in the period of time between now and the end of the universe -- we deal with the vanishingly small probability of terrorism in a rational way. We may do this by keeping the rule of law and democracy in tact.

Debbie Schlussel hates fat (and brown) people and the liberals hiding behind them. So much fat, so many liberals.

Debbie Schlussel is concerned -- in a rather morbid way -- she's morbidly concerned that liberals are engaged in an evil plot to rid the world of junk food, starving us all except for the Hollywood elite, who shall grow to Jabba the Hut sizes. Hollywood will then exalt morbid obesity as the new unattainable body type. We shall all huddle around our few old CRT televisions and watch as the Jabba the Hut version of Kristin Chenoweth is carried down the red carpet by her skinny, disgusting manservants, and we shall lick our lips at the prospect of scavenging enough caloric intake to one day be as satiated and luxuriant as Jabba Keifer Sutherland.

Why -- how, God -- does Debbie Schlussel divine these things? Does she consume Teh Spice? Does she commune with Ronald Reagan's ghost? Does Spice provide access to Ronald Reagan's ghost? Nej. Debbie Schlussel has deduced the foul liberal agenda because People magazine editors "They" have determined Gabourey Sidibe, Oscar-nominated actress of Precious fame, to be a "Most Beautiful Person". Sidibe is an obese African-American woman. Debbie Schlussel objects to this new definition of beauty, and she adds these racially charged racist remarks, because why not: "she's not just any fat actress, she’s a Black fat actress in a ghetto movie promoted by Oprah and based on a 'gangsta lit' book."

As I see it, People is promoting an excellent actress who broke through Hollywood's glass ceiling for large women and non-whites. That's beautiful. As Debbie sees it, however, People magazine editors Hollywood is thinking one of two things: (1) They really think Gabourey Sidibe is beautiful, which is ridiculous because everyone knows that Hollywood thinks that only size six bodies can be beautiful (QED). (2) They love food more than they hate fat people, so their alliance with liberal foodie Nazis is really an effort to impoverish Real 'Murica of food and concentrate food in Hollywood, where the stars will feast and grow enormous at our expense. In the latter construction, Gabourey Sidibe is a dry run for Jabba Lindsey Lohan.

In summary, Debbie Schlussel is ugly -- on the inside.

The wingnut argument for nuclear restraint

Wait! Where are you going? Here me out, damnit! This is good. Jonah Goldberg, manchild of Lucianne Goldberg, sez:

Ultimately, when and how a country uses its nuclear weapons does not depend on treaties. It depends on the Commander-in-Chief. Sure, worries about violating a treaty might — probably would — make using nukes more "costly" in a president's cost-benefit analysis. But at the end of the day, using nukes is such a huge deal that I think most presidents, most human beings, would make the decision based on their core values and instincts. And, suffice it to say, I don't think Barack Obama would ever use nuclear weapons under almost any remotely plausible circumstances.

As promised, this blogger will ignore the notion that refusal to destroy the universe makes one a pussy. He will instead make the wingnut argument for not pushing the button: In the event of WWIII, our brave, grizzled survivors of nuclear Armageddon will need a land of milk and honey to brutally conquer and subjugate. Like the Jews of yore wandering in the Wilderness, they will need a land free of plutonium if they are to smuggle their exceptionally resilient (and undoubtedly conservative) seeds into the next generation. We shall need a virgin land, and this land shall belong to our enemies. And like zombies we shall descend upon the virgin land of our enemies and rapaciously consume it. We shall make our gluttony pleasing to our God Jehovah by gathering the choicest pieces of ass and cremating them inside the belly of the Wicker Man. We shall force the pagan warlords to watch as we rudely introduce their harem-women to our large, Western penises. We shall rebuild the Temple of David and place a large, gaudy crucifix atop it. We shall institute a ban on headscarves. We shall repeal universal healthcare and force everyone to buy shitty HMOs. We shall emulate the powerful moral governance of the Catholic Church and choose a pope who will order the weakest amongst us not to have buttseks.

In these ways we shall avenge our vaporized brethren and build anew atop the fertile corpses of our foes. And all because our president had the foresighted restraint not to push the button.

Corporate whores need proper uniforms.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizen's United case, it's clear that the people need to strike back. Here's one solution that I heard from a caller to the Diane Rehm Show today: legislators need to wear sponsorship patches on their suits.

the Haitian Earthquake

As with the devastation wrought by Katrina, I hope that our thoughts of Haiti turn to the inconvenient fact that natural disasters are often anything but. Haitians are dying in disproportionate numbers right now because they are poor and oppressed. The oppression came first, then the poverty, then more oppression. It's a positive feedback loop. Poor people are not only easy to oppress (keep up the good work Iraq and Afghanistan), they seem to literally beg for it. So in Haiti's time of need, know that they need more than the world's temporary relief efforts. They need the world -- namely us -- to finally leave them the hell alone.

update: There are more Haitian history sources at the end of this wonderful post at Reclusive Leftist.

update 2: The folks at Credo, the progressive phone company, sent me an email with two ways to help Haiti: give to Doctors Without Borders, and tell Obama to grant temporary protected status to Haitians living in the U.S.