BunkBlog

A pro-war rally got less than a thousand participants, days after the 100,000 anti-war rally nearby. That’s gotta hurt. There seems to be a real lack of logic on the part of many people, though. This woman, for instance:

“Our troops are over there fighting for our rights, and if she was in one of those countries she would not be able to do that,” Vigna said.

Yeah, exactly why it’s ok for Cindy Sheehan to be able to say any damned thing she wants to. She can claim to be the reincarnation of Frank Sinatra – it doesn’t matter. The fantastic thing about our country is that people are allowed to be stupid or controversial or anything they want.

I don’t agree with everything that Cindy Sheehan says, but I spent 12 years in the Army defending her right to say whatever pops into her head. Good for her. And good for Rush Limbaugh the drug user, and good for G Gordon Liddy the convicted felon. Good for Dr Laura, the therapist with no credentials in psychiatry. Good for Mike Moore, who conflates opinions and facts and hopes nobody notices. Good for Jonny Depp for bashing the country that pays his salary.

Good for all of them – they can all be as stupid as they want to, and that is what makes America great. To tell any one of those Americans that they shouldn’t say what they are saying is the treasonous thing. That attitude of restricting speech with which you don’t agree is Unamerican. If you don’t like it, stop listening!

“Today Christians stand at the head of [our country] … I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.”

Who would say such a thing? Is it Swaggart? Is it Robertson? Bush? Maybe it’s Tom DeLay?

Give up?

Think Germany, late 30s, short Austrian man. Yeah.

If you do a search for “I voted for the moron” on Google, you now get my post about the button and bumpersticker design I made. I wonder how frequently that particular search is made. hehe

Remember that New Design I posted two weeks ago? One of my coworkers is proud of her “Blame Me – I voted for the moron” button. She feels that he’s not a moron, but she considers it a “buck stops here” statement. Although she and I have vastly different views on the proper role of government, we do agree on one thing – there’s been a whole lot of stupid to spread around on all layers of government lately.

By the way, the buttons don’t refer to any particular political candidate or official, so you can give them to anyone who you think has voted badly, for any race. Cheers.

What’s up with the GOP? The formerly solid wall of “Bush can do no wrong” is crumbling lately. Not only has Bill Frist gone against the White House by following his medical experience instead of faith-based science and supporting stem cell research, now he’s calling for hearings on the federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Damn. They haven’t even counted the dead yet, there are hundreds still to rescue from rooftops around New Orleans, and Frist is hacking at the Prez? Where was your spine when you could have prevented something, Mr. Majority Leader? Did you have to wait for Maxine Waters to pull her Jesse Jackson-assisted publicity stunt at England AFB before you could start questioning some of the bizarre decisions the administration has made?

Blame Me – I voted for the moron (not really, but that’s the design)

Sarcasm 3 is my latest attempt at graphical humor. If you are humorless, don’t bother going there – you’ll just get mad.

I’ve just bookmarked NK News under “Online Oddities” – it’s a searchable archive of all the wacky DPRK propaganda spewed onto the web from the Korean Central News Agency. Fun stuff, and the host is Kim Jung Il (as portrayed in Team America).

I love the amazing chutpah of people who mindlessly back a political personality. Some jackass drove his pickemup truck over a war memorial. This good ol’ boy destroyed hundreds of crosses memorializing the fallen servicemembers and desecrated the American flag by driving over dozens of them as well.

So, as Patridiot says:

bq. That’s some kind of moral relativism from the right wing. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you support the war, that’s a valuable moral thing and any desecration of the memorial is treason. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you oppose the war, that’s a godless, anti-American thing and any desecration of the memorial is patriotic.

Way to go, moron. Way to help your side look like reasonable and sane human beings. Yep.

Twelve years I served in the United States Army. I shudder to think that anyone could be persuaded to believe this type of behavior is supporting the troops. You ran over the crosses and ripped up the flag! Holy crap, what a jackass.

Kung Fu Monkey has a great post on The President and Intelligent Design

bq. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview — they can instead hunt down “facts” and “theories” which support their own comfort zone, and what’s worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders — pardon me, your leaders — don’t call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!

Bush used his authority to make Bolton the new UN Ambassador, during the Congressional recess. This is not the first time Bush has used the recess appointment ploy to bypass the Senate, so I guess nobody should be surprised. When the going gets tough, the Prez gets sneaky.

I’m not surprised by recent revelations regarding Karl Rove, as anyone with a brain could see it coming a mile away. I’m somewhat surprised that he actually got caught, since this administration is absolutely fantastic at keeping things hidden.

I’m disappointed in two groups lately – politicians and the intelligence professionals I know. Politicians are disappointing pretty much as a matter of course in recent decades, and increasingly so with each passing year. As the whole Iraq War/Wilson/Plame controversy rages, it shows a distressing willingness on the part of a political party to put the harming of another political party above the safety of American citizens and the intelligence network we work so hard to build.

When Valerie Plame was outed as a covert agent, it didn’t hurt just her career. It hurt the ability of this country to gather intelligence which was vital to supporting the War on Terror. If the War on Terror is the most important thing in the minds of the current administration, why would they harm our fragile human intelligence collection ability just to score public relations points with the press? It’s astonishing, it’s disgraceful, and it’s par for the course in recent years.

I’m also disappointed in some of the people I’ve known for years in the intelligence community. It’s hardly a surprise to most people that the military and (by extension) the intel community are largely Republican. What might surprise some people is how many of these supposedly intelligent and highly-trained people are able to go along with the most convoluted justifications for the poor behavior of some politicians. Just because the President is Republican doesn’t mean he can do no wrong. Nixon was a Republican and he didn’t get forced from office by Democrats, but by his own party.

Yesterday I was privy to a conversation wherein two intelligence professionals, each of whom had more than two decades of experience in the Mideast area, were discussing how absurd it is that the Democrats are so obsessed with Karl Rove leaking Plame’s identity and blowing her cover. Why shouldn’t the Democrats be obsessed with this? We should all be obsessed with it, because it is part of a bigger campaign to discredit the press, abuse the intelligence community, and falsify materials to further an agenda which is not supported by facts. Intelligence professionals should be interested in truth and not in political agendas. To apologize for someone leaking classified material and damaging our ability to collect intelligence on Bad Guys is, in my mind, onconscionable.

This goes for any political party, by the way. Sandy Berger swiping classified material from the National Archives is just as slimy as Rove outing Plame. Anyone who is that cavalier with classified material should go to jail and never be trusted by any other American again.

I’m also disappointed to hear the President say that he will fire anyone in his administration who is convicted of a crime. Last year, it was anyone who was involved in leaking classified material, the year before that it was anyone who was involved in the leak of Plame’s identity. Nice to see that he keeps raising the bar on what will constitute an offense worth firing someone. Of course, this is a President who has fired nobody ever, as well as never once vetoing a bill. Sounds like he doesn’t want to make tough decisions except in the case of throwing our military on a bonfire.

I leave you with one thought. Take it any way you please.
The oath of enlistment that I took when I was active duty includes the phrase, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

As reported in What’s New:

bq. It’s been traveling for 28 years and is now 8.7 billion miles from Earth. It just reported that it has entered the region of the heliosheath, where the solar wind begins to dissipate. It may be in this region another 10 years. Its Pt-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) should keep operating until about 2020. When Voyager 1 crosses that final boundary, becoming the first human artifact to enter interstellar space, Earth won’t know. Communications with Voyager will be cut off to save $4.5M of NASA’s $16.5B budget (.025%), for Bush’s Moon/Mars “vision.”

Fox News Alert! Bizarre Sex Habits of The Extreme Right-Wing

Radical anti-abortionist assists in killing doctors, and admits to past beastiality. Also, hints at past gay sex. Oh, the hypocrisy! The humanity!

Hehe

Court has ruled against the broadcast flag, making many pieces of hardware legal again. Yay!

Thanks to Guav for the proof of bizarre hypocrisy in the GOP today.
Congress is about to pass legislation to “save” the life of the permanent vegetable Terry Schiavo. Every doctor who has ever examined her in the past decade came to the conclusion that she, as a functioning human being, is gone. She is not alive except in a strictly mechanical definition. Yet Congress is going to pass a law that addresses her specifically. Bizarre enough.
The President cut off his vacation (one of thousands he seems to take since becoming the most overpaid chief executive in the history of this country) in order to be sure to be in Washington to sign this critical piece of legislation.
Just this past week, because of legislation that Governor Bush signed into law in Texas years ago, a baby died after being taken off life support. Unlike the Schiavo case, there is no family member begging for the baby to be allowed to die and other members begging for the baby to be kept alive. Now, this baby was born with a fatal disease, but even so – the doctors got to override the family’s wishes period. Nobody in Washington wanted to take up any special legislation for this child. What’s the difference? Are they still concerned with looking good in the swing state of Florida, but Texas will vote for the GOP even if they fielded Beelzebub for office?

This is an interesting piece about the origins of the neocons, which points to a disconnection (in my opinion) between the original neocons of the 70s and the group often labeled with that epithet today. Notice the folks generally called neocons in this administration never label themselves at all or align themselves publicly with any other group.

The Democrats introduced an amendment to a bill sponsored by shills for MBNA; the amendment would prevent poor military members from being screwed over by being forced into bankruptcy when they’re deployed and can’t handle their bills properly because they’re being shot at. The Republicans (wrapped in flags at the time, no doubt) shot the amendment down.

Way to support our troops.

Greenspan sounds U.S. deficit warning

bq. U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan issued one of his toughest warnings yet to Congress yesterday about the danger of letting the country’s giant budget deficits persist, saying “the consequences for the U.S. economy of doing nothing could be severe.”

Well, that’s it. He’s gonna be fired soon. Nobody is allowed to speak ill of Republican deficits. Democratic deficits, those are evil. GOP debt, that’s a patriotic duty.

This is a good description of why I’m building a MythTV box this spring. Of course, it may be illegal to build one by the fall, so I’d better get on it. Maybe I’ll buy an HDTV card for future use, before they’re banned in the USA.

Go innovation!

Previous post on this topic is here.

If you haven’t seen the Oscar-winning short film, “Ryan”, go see it now. Fantastic. Beautiful. Heartbreaking.