But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

I found the cutest letter today in the LATimes, from a guy who clearly lives in Camelot. Or Xanadu. Or Somewhere Over The Rainbow, where life is perfect:

This current noise about Pelosi's determination to bring ethics reform to the House is, when you poke beneath the surface, totally laughable.

I expect this ethics reform to last maybe a couple of weeks, and then it will be the same old dirty business by the Democrats that the Republicans honed so well. You can change a person's clothes, but you don't change the body inside the clothes.

Why doesn't someone ask why grown men and women, supposedly mature, elected to national office, need to create an institutional set of ethical rules to govern themselves with integrity?

Why wasn't their ethical sense already built into them in childhood?

If this weren't so disgustingly tragic, it would be utterly hilarious.

So the nation observes these moral infants scurrying around trying to find a way to keep their colleagues' hands out of the cookie jar. It's no wonder that the general public regards the ethics of our congressional members as ranking somewhere between used car salesmen and card sharks at the casino.

Dude, let me explain: See, not everyone shares your high sense of morals and ethics. And not everyone was raised right. That's why we have laws. And rules about stuff.

I'm sure Jack Abramoff was raised in a good home, and probably Duke Cunningham too. And maybe even Tom DeLay. And I'm pretty sure that Oliver North, and Richard Nixon, and even G. Gordon Liddy were schooled in ethics and propriety. But here's the thing:

They all were and are crooks!

They broke the law, and in most cases were punished. Well, not really in Nixon's and North's cases, bastards.

So, my friend of the high-minded virtue, we have laws because folks will break them and need to be punished. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's just the way it goes.

Deal.

And the public gets what the public wants

Debra Bowen will be sworn in as California's new Democratic Secretary of State tomorrow. The ceremony can be seen here: http://www.debrabowen.com/inauguration

We met Debra last February at a blogger's meeting along with Kevin Drum, Brad Friedman, Mark Kleiman, Marc Danziger, and several others. She's really smart, and very committed to non-partisan voting integrity. By that I mean she's against the Diebold machines with no verifiable paper trail, and wants to make sure all votes are counted accurately, unlike her predecessor.

California's lucky to have her. Sadly, we still have Arnie, too.


Update: Brad Friedman, the hardest working blogger on election reform and Diebold hackery adds this from his Friday piece:

Columnist Thomas D. Elias, of the Ventura County Star, has written the single best MSM article we've ever read on the problems with the current state of our electoral system. Period.

In covering changes planned by incoming CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Elias --- for the first time, at least that I've ever seen anywhere in the MSM --- squarely places the blame for the entire fine mess we're in exactly where it belongs: On the voting machine companies and the elections officials who have been their enablers and apologists...

An anxious time is just about to begin for the two interest groups that have done more than anyone else in recent years to make Californians feel uncertain about the integrity of their elections.
Those two groups: The makers of electronic voting machines of various types, many of whose devices have been shown to be both hackable and problematic in other ways. And county voter registrars who bought those machines largely with many millions of dollars derived from the federal Help America Vote Act, which was more concerned about speed of conversion to new technologies than whether they were trustworthy.

And this:

On Bowen's plans for full 'top to bottom review' of outgoing SoS McPherson's rubber-stamp certification of all electronic voting machines...

"We are going to do a top to bottom review of every voting system in use anywhere in California," Bowen said in an interview. "Yes, I would consider decertifying machines that my predecessor approved. Unfortunately, we've spent a lot of money on equipment that's not ready for prime time. Any Fortune 500 company would have sent those machines back with a letter saying they just don't do what they're supposed to."

On the truth (finally!) about the feckless and incompetent McPherson...

Her appointed predecessor and defeated autumn opponent, the former Republican State Sen. Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz was anything but a skeptic, certifying virtually any machine any county registrar wanted to buy and imposing questionable checks on their performance.

Thanks, Brad!

Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns

Eisenhower said:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

Goldwater said:

"When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."

Conservatives, both. Unlike the idiots pulling the puppet strings in and around the White House today.

Thankfully, the American Conservative magazine has blogger extraordiaire Glenn Greenwald in the new issue:

When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush’s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances.

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

Accountability. What a concept!

Conceit is a disease that the doctors got no cure

While the insanity of the winger world never ceases to surprise, the evil sometimes does. A winger I had never heard of takes a swipe at our good friend Jane Hamsher, in a way that is pretty remarkable:

I'll defer to James Wolcott for analysis:

The year is still tenderly young, but I doubt a greasier display of misogyny will raise its vulgar head for the remainder of '07 to outdo this exhibition of pique.

Apparently unable to translate light irony into his native lingo, American Digest's resident oracle "fisks" (as they're fonding of saying over there in the fantasy-based blogosphere) a post by Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher comically complaining about Daily Kos's Markos cracking the top ten in the Twenty Most Annoying Liberals awards handed out by some rightwing sinkhole while she was fobbed off with an "Honorable Mention." Hamsher self-deprecatingly, self-mockingly, genially wonders how she fell short in liberal annoyingness, only to be set straight on that score by the Digester. Hamsher's questions, in italics, are followed by his fiskings.

What did I do wrong? It is hard to know where to begin? Was it your decision to start down the birth canal? Perhaps later when you felt compelled to ask, "Daddy, is this the right thing to do?" Later still when you were rejected for Army Ranger training because you just had to ask and tell? It is difficult to know when that wrong turn leading to the long, wrong road was taken, Jane, but know always that -- whenever you are ready -- Jesus is there for you.

Was I not shrill and caustic enough?
No, I am certain this was not the case. For those afflicted by blazing hormones, there is no such thing as beyond infinity shrill and caustic. You have the tiara, Jane, wear it with pride.

Did I not do enough to mock Michelle Malkin and her histrionic halucinations?
No woman in love with an impossible goddess could have done more to mock her love object than you have done, Jane. Just lay back, select a cucumber, and think of England.

But my question is about this lovely statement:

...Jane's been in a perpetual state of peeve since she caught a dose of BDS and it metastasized into the implants.

So, I'm curious. Does the crack about implants come because Jane is, you know, a woman, and all women who worked in Hollywood at any time in their career have implants?

If so, that's charmingly provincial, a fly-over state mysogynistic bash against us left coasters.

But if it's because Jane is a breast cancer survivor, then you are foul soul, a pathetic man with a shriveled dick. And I hope you have to cope with cancer in your life. I know I have (see Sister Kristin).

I rarely wish bad upon someone, instead believing that some form of Karma will even things out. But pal, if you are making fun of Jane's illness, then you deserve whatever karmic payback the universe deems fair.

Bastard!


Update:

Here is a pic of Jane & Pam at our Big Deal L.A. Blogger's Party (aka Kobepalooza) Aug. '05:

I can't wait forever, to know if you'll be true, Time won't let me

In the "Even a broken clock is right twice a day" news category, Confederate Yankee, tbogg's latest nemesis, is, well, maybe, right?:

So here is my completely groundless theory:

Negroponte is moving in to be in a position to take over for Rice, but not because Rice is going out of office, but up. Vice President Dick Cheney will resign due to much more plausible health problems (the poor guy has worn-out defibrillators, hasn't he?), and Dr. Rice will step in as our first female Vice President sometime during the summer or early fall of 2007. She will then be "pushed" into running as the Republican contender against Hillary, setting up our first guaranteed female president as a result of the 2008 elections. At this point, Pat Robertson will quote some obscure translation of the Book of Revelations and declare this is proof of the End of Days, at which point we all laugh at him.

Again.

Of course, that's just my theory. I could be wrong.

Of course, that's this Negroponte:

He has been criticized because of his involvement in the covert funding of the Contras, and there are allegations that he was in involved in a coverup of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras, where he was the U.S. chief of mission in the 1980s. It was in Honduras that Negroponte first worked with the former executive director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. According to The New York Times, Negroponte carried out "the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua."

(cartoon borrowed from Scott Bateman)

All in all, Negroponte's a really sweet guy.

I like smoke and lightning, heavy metal thunder

2 fairly big moments in rock occurred in '69 & '70, that would shape much of the music thereafter.

The first, in Jan., 1969, was the release of Led Zepplin. The sprawling muscularity of the music sounded epic at the time, and has held up remarkably, inspiring many musicians and songwriters ever since. The opening chords of "Good Times, Bad Times" still ring as they did then with a delicious tension as each drum fill becomes more intricate until the octave E riff takes over.

The second 'big moment', however, may have been even more important: the release in 1970 of Black Sabbath. While Zepplin was indeed heavy, Black Sabbath was the first album to live up to the phrase immortalized in Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild": Heavy Metal.

Here, from their second album Paranoid, is "Iron Man":



And here's Zepplin doing "Dazed and Confused" live on Danish TV in '69:

And I wouldn't've been here, down on the killin' floor

GWBush:

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."

How they do it:


How Americans do it:


GWBush:

"If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. It’s just — I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective."

Oh Yeah?

My baby, she wrote me a letter

Eric Alterman's daughter writes a letter to GWBush:

Name: Eve Rose Alterman
Hometown: New York, New York

January 1, 2007

Dear Mr. Bush,

I dislike that you are president but now that you are I will have to find a way to live with it. I have two requests. Please try to end the war in Iraq as soon as possible. If you are a good man, [witch I do not believe you are and neither do most people.] One of the things you can do to prove you are a good man is actually stop the war in Iraq as soon as possible! And cut the price on taxes especially for poor people and pick up the price for rich people! See what you have been doing is pickin up the price for poor people cutting it for rich people! Please think about what I have said to you in this letter Mr. Bush and really think about how many lives you would be saving and sick people you would be helping!!!!!!!!

Sincerely,
Eve Rose Alterman

Indeed!

I found out today we're going wrong

Still using musical metaphors, here's the last 6 years in a nutshell:

Cream: We're Going Wrong

I will be with you again

Because it's obvious: New Year's Day: