So Suharto’s dead

I wonder if I can find a mainstream media blowjob piece on him.

20 seconds of looking. Fucker killed a million people, and because we helped him, we’re gonna pretend he wasn’t that bad.  Good show guys.

I wonder

I wonder if I could sum up my problems with identity politics in a neat 400 hundred words or so.

Ah, here we go. 

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard.  Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few.  Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.   

And now the greatest betrayal!  We are repaid with his abandonment!  He’s picked the new guy over us.  He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one).  “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow).  “They” are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future. 

The ultimate betrayal.

 I would have been more than a little shocked if Teddy went for Hillary.  Teddy and the Clintons represent two separate spheres of influence in the Democratic party, with the Clintons occupying the moderate-right,and Teddy representing what passes for “progressive” .  If you’ve read this blog before, I’m sure you have gleaned that I have little sympathy for Democratic moderates.   It is their rule that gave us NAFTA, welfare “reform”, and –let’s be honest– every despicable capitulation we’ve had to bear over the past 7 years. 

Hillary Clinton is everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party.  If you want to vote for her simply because she happens to be the right gender, I’m not sure we have much to say.

  How uplifting has Condeleeza Rice’s career been?

Something I missed

Maybe you missed it too. From alternet.

Earlier in the week, a group representing a majority of lawmakers in Iraq’s parliament — a group made up of Sunni, Shiite and secular leaders — sent a letter to the Security Council, a rough translation of which reads: “We reject in the strongest possible terms the unconditional renewal of the mandate and ask for clear mechanisms to obligate all foreign troops to completely withdrawal from Iraq according to an announced timetable.”

Good to know.

Dear Speaker Pelosi

Flattery is something i always try to avoid– such a transperant manipulation technique– but in your case, I have to say it because it’s true: You are special.  There just aren’t more than five people on the planet that inspire the physical sensations in me that you do.  Like when I read

Senior Democrats have decided that holding a controversial vote on the contempt citations, which have already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, would “step on their message” of bipartisan unity in the midst of the stimulus package talks.

I’m filled with a tightness in my throat, kind of like choking on bile, or vomit, except it stings more.   I call it obsenity gridlock.  All the exiting new names, slurs, theats, suggestions about your mother’s love of pets– the whole schmear– get caught right near my adams apple.  There’s just so much to say to you that I cannot even say one thing.  I am struck dumb.  And before I drop over on the ground, scratching my broken finger nails at my neck in terror, I just need to tip my cap to you.

Good job Ms. Pelosi. 

Clap clap.

Quote of the day

I find the NY Times and Washington Post much more comprehensible if I just think of them as the church newsletters for a particularly unpleasant religion. OF COURSE the people who write the newsletter believe in transubstantiation.

And the silly shit

First off, can i just say how happy i am that this stupid crap didn’t start until well after 9/11?

And then this.  You know, call me a paranoid, but MMORPGs creep me out a little.  No, wait, I meant a lot.  Yes, as a person older than twelve devoting 6 plus hours a day killing orcs online seems like a sign of mental illness, but it’s a bit more than that.  When you play these you are trying to develop a new persona in a universe completely created and maintained by a corporation.  Now, I’ve never heard of Blizzard using child labor or something, but still: Creepy.  And when you’re talking about Disney?  Freaking Disney? 

Yikes.  So many sensible people are going in for this.  Weird. 

All right…

I wanna throw out a bunch of links, but I’ve noticed that they all fall into one of two categories: Either deeply upsetting or just plain annoying. In the interest of not trivializing horrible stuff, lets divide these into two separate posts, and start with the nightmare inducing.

Like this.

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists.

Yeah, didn’t hear much about this one, but it sounds pretty important, in that maintaining-global-hegemony-with-terrifying-violence kinda way, huh?

Oh here: Looks like hospitals will soon be able to mine your credit history to see if you’re a risk for bailing. No problems there.

Oh, and brace yourself for this one kids: Turns out Bush wasn’t exactly truthful in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. I know, I know. Who can we believe in? Aquaman, where are you?

You probably should be busy hating yourself over this:

From January 2006 to April 2007, sporadic conflict and related effects such as closure of clinics and disruption of food supplies caused the deaths of approximately 727,000 people, the group estimated.

Yes, what is happening in Darfur is awful, but this is worse, and it gets minimal attention, perhaps because the story isn’t as clear cut and simple. You know how we love our narratives nice and straightforward. That’s because we are simple minded idiots.

I don’t wanna read the news today

Here’s the Smif ‘n Wessun with Raekwon instead

Yes, 90s rap was just better.  Deal with it.

God help me

But i think i agree with Bush on this one.

Congress has reached a compromise with the White House over a defense authorization bill provision that had drawn complaints from the Iraqi government.

Those complaints prompted President Bush to veto the defense bill last month. He complained that a provision in the bill that allowed victims of terrorism to be awarded compensation from frozen foreign assets of state sponsors of terror could have crippled the fledgling Iraqi government with billions of dollars in liability.

Under the compromise, Iraq is excluded from the provision, but other state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria, could see frozen assets used as compensation. The compromise is likely to leave American victims taken hostage and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime during the first Gulf War without recourse in U.S. federal court.

I’ve been watching this for a little while, and I’ve been confused by the liberal blogworld’s take. Atrios, for example, describes Bush’s reaction as being “on the side of the torturers”. Well, far be it from me to suggest that Bush isn’t a torturer himself, but in this case, I really don’t see the problem. Why should Iraqis be penalized for crimes committed by a regime that inflicted a tremendous amount of suffering on the Iraqis themselves? Wouldn’t this qualify as odious debt?

Wonderment

The NYT notices that things aren’t going so well.