Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Tattlesnake After Blago the Deluge? Edition

January 31, 2009
By

“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” – Abraham Lincoln Last Thursday, Illinois Speaker of the House and state Democratic Party Chair Mike Madigan finally managed, with the help of Patrick “Spotless Mind” Fitzgerald, the bankrupt Chicago Tribune editorial board, and their cohort in the national Big Media, to get rid of Gov. Rod Blagojevich on 14 articles of impeachment that are quaint and laughable compared to the blatant offenses of Bush and Cheney. Among the horrible crimes Blago committed were abusing his power by making it easier for senior citizens to get their drugs at cheap Canadian prices; bringing health care to uninsured kids, and helping poor women get regular mammograms and cancer treatment. Seriously. Since Blago bypassed, apparently legally, the corrupt lead-asses in the state General Assembly, they called this an abuse of power. Of course the main charge that he tried to sell the US Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama was based entirely on Fitzgerald’s lip-licking public readings of excerpts of wiretapped tapes the actual full tapes have yet to be released — and remain unproven in…

Read more »

Suggestions, and decisions. Now is the time to speak up.

January 30, 2009
By

I am sure that a lot of you’ve noticed that over the past few months, I have not been around here much. I come by once in a while, drop a comment or two, maybe even a post, and then I am gone for the next week or so. Why? Mostly because of my health — I am undergoing a treatment that saps most of my energy, so that by the time I get home from work, all I want to do is veg in front of the TV. I no longer have the fire to argue politics — not even over at Misha’s site, where they can give a person an argument. But this site has never been about ME. I am just the guy supplying the bandwidth and a functional platform for others to provide the content. Content and promotion thereof should be up to the contributors and their readers. Last year, Liberaltopia was getting an average of 55 hits per day. But that has been dropping over the past few months, and now the average for January is a whopping 28 hits. That is pretty dismal for a group of people who won the last election. For…

Read more »

Time to freeze them out

January 29, 2009
By

Okay, Obama went the extra mile to include the truculent House Republicans in the adult stuff — and they proved once again why they are now the minority party by voting against the stimulus bill. Even after Democrats made a series of concessions to the Republicans by taking out some key provisions and including some tax cuts that the Republicans wanted, they chose to vote against it. Even though they knew Obama was coming over to talk to them, their leadership instructed the rank and file to vote against the bill before they gave him the courtesy of hearing him out. Fuck them. There is a reason why 53 percent of the voters chose Obama over their candidate — the majority of people in this country don’t want what the Republicans are peddling. In fact, polls are saying that 71 percent of the American public are all for this stimulus bill — as originally written. I say, go back to the original bill — before the concessions, and vote the whole thing in. Leave the Republicans to just sit there and whine. We have the votes — we simply don’t need them. It isn’t like they wouldn’t just shut the…

Read more »

The Tattlesnake It’s Worse Than You Think Edition

January 28, 2009
By

MSNBC reported this morning that the Peanut Corporation of America yes, someone actually named a company that knowingly shipped out products contaminated by salmonella. (So much for the market policing itself.) The FDA alerted the PCA of the contamination last year. Did some exec at PCA decide, ala the Ford Pinto, that it would be cheaper to handle food poisoning lawsuits than recall its products? Stay tuned. (They’re just lucky that the salmonella wasn’t one of the new drug-resistant strains.) BTW, we’ve been losing approximately 500,000 jobs a month, or 6 million annually, for some several years now. That means that the Bush Labor Department’s employment figures were skewed and actual unemployment is much higher than the government has been reporting. (But you knew that.) Quick — try to think of the difference between the way Stalin ran the USSR and the way the average American CEO runs a multi-national mega-corporation. Those at the very top prosper, everyone else suffers, and the system is completely corrupt and immoral. (And don’t fool yourself that the stockholders are any more effective at controlling Comrade Chairman than were the Politburo; as in the old Soviet Union, the deck is stacked against…

Read more »

Inspection- Why Does God Blame Me?

January 26, 2009
By

I’ll bet almost everyone has experienced the family where one child is blamed for everything, or winds up being punished for what isn’t his fault. Maybe even a relative, like in my family… a cousin… he has an older brother who was treated as if he “can do no wrong.” Usually the older brother winds up a nit who does a lot of bad things and borders on evil in a very sadistic way. The younger brother winds up a mirror reflection of his older brother, though underneath it all; somewhere, exists the little kid who only wanted to do what was right, be loved and be treated fairly. Maybe the parents are having problems and they take it out on the child, or there are outside influences that destroy the couple… sometimes, but not always, “influences” within the family. There’s quite a bit of truth to the son or daughter who goes out and has a wildly successful life but when they come home: nothing they can do is right. The old, sick, demented family dynamics reassert themselves. That’s often why it’s best for some people to move away so they can have a bloody life instead of always…

Read more »

Can We Start With KBR?

January 25, 2009
By

As much as many would like to see what happened to the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination be the end result of the Bush/Cheney regime, we all know “ain’t gonna happen.” I have come to a conclusion that if anything is going to happen: Truth and Reconciliation. Unlikely, but about as far as weak kneed Dem leaders will ever go. Can we start with KBR? These “accidents” happened in facilities used as base camps for U.S. units, camps that were to have been completely refurbished – including the wiring – under terms of a $30 billion no-bid contract awarded to the one-time Halliburton subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg-Brown-Root).

Read more »

The Tattlesnake Random Notes on Bush’s Exit, Obama’s Entrance, and the Dying of the Right Edition

January 23, 2009
By

Part the One – Wow. Obama’s been president for three days and already he’s signed Executive Orders closing Gitmo; banning torture; suspending those odious ‘military tribunal’ trials; ending revolving-door lobbying; preventing lobbyists from occupying senior positions in agencies they once lobbied; requiring ethics courses for all of his staff (and he took the course himself); limiting the use of secrecy classification, even imposing Justice Department oversight on his ability to classify documents secret; and expanded government transparency, directing his administration to err on the side of Freedom of Information Act requests rather than the other way around. He also froze the pay of senior White House staff and informed them that as long as he’s president, none of them will quit and then turn around and lobby their friends still in his government, reversing years of Bush/Cheney corruption, sleaze, secrecy and illegality. What’s more, he did all of this while acting like a grown-up, speaking in full, clear, grammatical sentences, and taking his job seriously. It will be difficult, but pleasant, to adjust to a president who doesn’t have a smirk perpetually playing about his mouth, doesn’t need someone else to run his brain, and can think on his feet.…

Read more »

Inspection- Reflections in a Presidential Pool of Change

January 20, 2009
By

We’ve been swimming in a pool filled to the brim with filth for so long, is it possible there might be something to dive into other than sewage? Something that will reflect the best the nation has to offer instead of the most partisan; least noble aspirations? Something that won’t reflect the past eight years? Maybe.

Read more »

Ye Olde Scribe Presents: A Report from the Festivities in Washington

January 20, 2009
By

Being the famous, universally praised, rich internet entity that he is, Scribe is experiencing the festivities first hand. He has a prime seat: outside the furthest back barricade with a horde of stern SS agents (Are there any other kind? They come out of the box that way.) …and heavily armed soldiers blocking access.

Read more »

The Tattlesnake — Bush: The Way of All Flash Edition

January 20, 2009
By

The End of An Irritant Rational people, when faced with a massive failure of their own making, normally take some time for private circumspection and avoid further contact with the public, at least until the outrage of the torch-wielding villagers has subsided. But that’s not our Crawford Dauphin, whose capacity for realistic introspection is String Theory microcosmic while his unrefined chutzpah remains as large and lumbering as his political party’s logo. Such is the case with this recent series of cringe-inducing Bush ‘exit interviews’ wherein Our Worst President Ever insists on trying to polish a turd that was flushed away years ago in the receding waters of 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. Even with the prodigious help of future cellmates like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, assiduously applying the spit shine of hastily rewritten history to the ‘Bush Legacy Project’ (a slim library containing the works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Stranger Than Fiction,” a copy of George Orwell’s “1984″ annotated in red ink by Lee Atwater, tracts by Aimee Semple McPherson, the collected speeches of Father Charles Coughlin and Herbert Hoover, and, of course, the paint-by-number version of “My Pet Goat”) the Little President That Couldn’t continues to maintain approval ratings…

Read more »

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9 other subscribers