The LEFTY thread.

[Guest]

I GOT THIS IN AN EMAIL FROM MY GOOD FRIEND RAMBOZ. HE MAY BE SEEING THE LIGHT  

Subject: A criminal madman in the White House


From Capitol Hill Blue
The Rant
The criminal conspiracy that destroys America
By Doug Thompson
Jan 25, 2006


Sadly, the President of the United States is a criminal. In fact, he
should be arrested, tried and sentenced to life in prison as a repeat
offender.

He is a war criminal who led this nation into an illegal conflict based
on lies.  His criminal conduct in the invasion of Iraq has led to the
deaths of more than 2,000 American military men and women and countless
thousands of Iraqi civilians.

He ripped the Constitution to shreds, ordering the National Security
Agency, the Pentagon and other government agencies to spy on American
citizens.

His administration trampled basic American freedoms, creating a police
state through the Gestapo tactics of the Department of Homeland
Security and the rights-robbing USA Patriot Act.

He lied to the American people about his close relationship with
corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, claiming he didn't know the man
who raised more than $100,000 for his campaign and visited the White
House more than 200 times in his first year in office as well as trips
to the ranch in Crawford, Texas.

He ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to withhold information
about dangerous toxins dumped into the air over Manhattan when
terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.

His vice president met secretly with the CEOs of America's top energy
companies, cutting deals that gave those companies record profits while
ripping off consumers at the gas pump.

Bush's crimes against the Constitution and the American people began
the day he took office and continue today. Each day brings new
revelations of abuse of power, evasion of the law and disregard for
basic rights of privacy.

Under Bush's watch, the fears of George Orwell became all too real.
The NSA routinely monitors phone calls of American citizens. The
Defense Advance Research Projects Agency tracks routine travel and
financial activities of Americans. The Pentagon sends infiltrators to
spy on groups whose only crime is disagreement with the Iraq war or the
other Draconian actions of the Bush administration.

America is now a totalitarian state ruled by a fascist dictator who
hides behind phony claims that he is a "wartime president" who must
usurp the Constitution to protect us from ourselves. Ironically, the
"wartime president" is, in reality, a coward who hid out in the
Texas Air National Guard to avoid his own service in wartime, a
cardboard cowboy who sends others to die while he hides behind a legion
of Secret Service agents who no doubt gag at the thought of taking a
bullet for such a pathetic excuse for a leader.

But who protects us from the real enemy of freedom? That enemy resides
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, backed by a party that puts partisanship
above patriotism, power above freedom and political expediency above
justice.

I've come to the sad conclusion that the President of the United
States is a madman, a raving lunatic driven by an insane lust for
power, given to frequent outbursts of temper and out-of-control
tantrums.

Bush has plunged this nation into a deepening Constitutional crisis,
one that demands immediate action if we are to save what was once a
great nation.

The last President to precipitate such a crisis, Richard M. Nixon,
failed to destroy this nation because Congress, led by an opposition
party, stepped up and took the actions necessary. But today's
Congress is ruled by criminally-complicit thugs who share Bush's
fanatical views.

Together, Bush and his Republican cronies in Congress have led America
to ruin. Unfortunately, too many in this country have sat on their
asses and let it happen.

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

[Mai-Kee]

.... by the way talking about asshole goverments: Seems that here are two who found themselves!

United Nations: U.S. Aligned With Iran in Anti-Gay Vote
Rice Must Explain Repressive UN Ban on LGBT Rights Groups
(Washington, D.C., January 25, 2006) - In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.

€œThis vote is an aggressive assault by the U.S. government on the right of sexual minorities to be heard,€ said Scott Long, director of the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch. €œIt is astonishing that the Bush administration would align itself with Sudan, China, Iran and Zimbabwe in a coalition of the homophobic.€

In May 2005, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which is based in Brussels, and the Danish gay rights group Landsforeningen for Bøsser og Lesbiske (LBL) applied for consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Consultative status is the only official means by which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world can influence and participate in discussions among member states at the United Nations. Nearly 3,000 groups enjoy this status.

States opposed to the two groups€™ applications moved to have them summarily dismissed, an almost unprecedented move at the UN, where organizations are ordinarily allowed to state their cases. The U.S. abstained on a vote which would have allowed the debate to continue and the groups to be heard. It then voted to reject the applications.

€œThe United States recklessly ignored its own reporting proving the need for international support for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,€ said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. €œThe State Department€™s €˜Country Reports on Human Rights Practices€™ show severe human rights violations based on gender identity and sexual orientation occur around the world.€

As the U.S. government acknowledged in its 2004 country report on Iran, Iranian law punishes homosexual conduct between men with the death penalty. Human Rights Watch has documented four cases of arrests, flogging, or execution of gay men in Iran since 2003. In its 2004 country report on Zimbabwe, the U.S. government noted President Robert Mugabe€™s public denouncement of homosexuals, blaming them for €œAfrica's ills.€ In the past, Mugabe has called gays and lesbians €œpeople without rights€ and €œworse than dogs and pigs.€
The U.S. has reversed position since 2002, when it voted to support the International Lesbian and Gay Association€™s request to have its status reviewed. Officials gave no explanation for the change.

€œIt is deeply disturbing that, at the UN, the United States has shifted gears toward an aggressive stance against human rights for LGBT people,€ said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. €œUnfortunately, denying LGBT groups a voice and a presence within the United Nations €“ the world's most important human rights institution €“ is fully in keeping with the U.S.€™s assault on basic human rights principles worldwide.€

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Votes in favor of consultative status came from Chile, France, Germany, Peru, and Romania. Colombia, India, and Turkey abstained, while Côte d'Ivoire was absent.

€œIt is an absolute outrage that the United States has chosen to align itself with oppressive governments €“ all in an effort to smother the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people around the world,€ said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. €œIt is deeply disturbing that the self-proclaimed €˜leader of the free world€™ will ally with bigots at the drop of a hat to advance the right wing€™s anti-gay agenda.€

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/...n12535_txt.htm

[Guest]

Time to bump the famous Lefty Thread to it's rightful place at the top of the fishbox.  

Obese American Tourists, Ho!
One vacation to the Baja coast is all you need to see the staggering downfall of the country

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

I have seen deep azure seas and delicious star-addled skies and crazily overdressed mariachi bands playing "La Cucaracha" for drunken tourists so many times in one night the poor bass player looked like he wanted to be shot.

I have seen the classic American mullet and the epic Mexican mullet, both shockingly alive and well and for some ungodly reason flourishing like angry time-warp ferrets on the heads of beefy simpleminded men so utterly lost to time and space they should be in some sort of institution. I mean, my God.

I have seen white tube socks with brown sandals, dark tube socks with white tennis shoes, the unholy and relentless use of fanny packs with terrifying Jesus-themed T-shirts, big gnarly dudes from Midwestern Screwyouland wearing giant Harley-Davidson muscle shirts tucked way, way into high-waisted denim shorts (true), walking around the pool and smoking Marlboros and sucking in their massive bellies and trying to look as if they weren't as confused and discomfited as a water buffalo on the moon.

I have seen more awful tattoos on more sunburned sacra of more terribly drunk blank-eyed 20-something girl-women than your average Jenna Bush sorority pool party. I have witnessed the wide-eyed tourist throngs flooding in from the massive cruise ships anchored just off the Baja coast, tumbling onto land with their bright name tags and their 1994 haircuts and their cruise-ship logo hats to buy Mexican trinkets and have their pictures taken with a large exhausted iguana in a tiny sombrero.

Indeed, I have been to lovely and tourist-gobbled Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for a nice long mostly wonderful vacation, and I have seen it all. Or rather, most of it.

But what I have seen more than anything else, more frightening and distressing and still inexplicable and no matter how much of it you see you still can't quite grasp the magnitude and the soul-numbing tragedy, the bizarre foreignness of it, especially if you're from San Francisco or anywhere that revels in relative health and fitness and body consciousness -- what I have seen is obesity.

It is everywhere. It is astounding, perplexing, deeply sad. It crosses all age ranges, from 20 to 80, short to tall, rural to urbane, badly coiffed to heavily manicured. It would now appear that upward of 85 percent of Americans, according to my loose calculations, are somewhere between alarmingly and tremendously overweight, and a great many of these are just shockingly obese. Serious, dock-shaking obese. Can't-get-out-of-the-pool-without-help obese. It is not something that makes you feel particularly good about the American ethos.

I know, it's an epidemic, worsening by the month. I know, excess girth is everywhere in the U.S., rampant and heartbreaking and telling. I know, moreover, that the causes are complicated and messy, related to laziness and a vicious lack of education and a culture where everyone claims to be a victim, along with a conspiracy among junk-food purveyors and major pharmcos to dupe you into thinking you can eat whatever chemical-loaded crap you want and they'll just give you a fistful of pills and some violent plastic surgery to keep you from going blind and dropping dead and failing to pay your taxes.

I know it is related, furthermore, to the ridiculous American idea of excess and entitlement and supersizing, of deep-fried everything, of a savage detachment from our bodies and the ingredients in our foods, a sort of willful ignorance, all coupled with a voracious hunger for something we've lost, a spiritual vacuity, a lack of true nourishment even as we stuff ourselves to death. I know.

But it is worse than you might imagine. I saw thousands of people, mostly ash-white, deeply unhealthy, middle-class Americans who, from what I could overhear, were mostly from the central states, though many I met were also from inland California and Oregon and Idaho. And the number who appeared genuinely healthy, who appeared truly comfortable in their skins, who walked without evident pain or discomfort and with straight spines and an easy gait, who weren't necessarily rail-thin but who just seemed to be their natural weight for their frame and height, these made up a mere fraction. A sliver. A rarity, like seeing a penguin in the desert, a gay Latino at a GOP convention, a green salad in Arkansas. Everyone else -- and I do mean everyone else -- was, to some aching degree, hugely flabby and out of scale.

It was, in a word, disquieting. And horribly depressing.

Here's the thing: Massive girth and rolling flab, for most of this country, is a way of life. It is what's expected, what everyone else looks like, the norm. Americans are, generally speaking, huge, unhealthy, more detached from their bodies than a George Bush from a dictionary. And what's more, no one seems to notice or care. It's the great American shrug.

Indeed, during my vacation I met and spoke with a great many of these people, most of whom were wonderful and kind and generous as any you can hope to meet in your life, full of warmth and humor and friendliness. Massive weight, of course, has little to do with personality type, though I imagine it has quite a lot to do with upbringing and education and a weird sheen of malaise, of apathy, a profound disconnect between the functioning of the world and the systems of the flesh.

But it is still a bizarre phenomenon, this pandemic, flying in the face of our rampant obsessions with beauty and thinness and celebrity, with gyms and vitamins and ridiculous muscle-building equipment on late-night infomercials. Here in the famed San Francisco bubble, with its incredible array of spas and outdoor activities and yoga studios, our love of Whole Foods and farmers' markets and organic everything, you simply don't see this level of physical neglect, this utter rejection of the body as something to be cultivated and cared for. It is simply not a factor.

Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing, followed by an early and very uncomfortable death.

What, pray tell, are we becoming? Where are we headed? What to make of a nation defined by a heavy, gut-busting lethargy among the majority of its population, by a shocking sluggishness and an obvious loathing of the flesh and the inability to quickly hoist ourselves up off the couch and launch ourselves headlong into the world with something resembling joy and lightness and vigor? Is it too late to just go back to the mullets and the fanny packs? Do you already know the answer?

[Guest]

OK, I shudda posted this around the 1st of the month, but I was too busy running around LOS.

The Real State Of The Union
How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

Yes, we are on the brink of epic destruction involving war and sweaty religious nutballs and a mad grab for the planet's few remaining gurgles of oil and the general appalling lousiness of the new TV season. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Destruction can be healthy. A positive force. Destruction sweeps the place bare, scrubs out the spiritual colon, cleanses the palate for what's next. And besides, have you seen "Grey's Anatomy"? Totally cute.

But here's the best part: No one really knows what's next. Oh sure, we have prognosticators and pundits and professional fearmongers from the GOP and the religious right who want to tell you that the apocalypse is nigh and God hates everything you do and if the terrorists don't get your fresh innocent white babies, the gays or the pot smokers or the rappers will.

But the truth is, we really haven't the slightest clue what's going on. Hell, 20 years ago, who could have predicted the insane rise of the Internet? The success of the Toyota Prius? Five-hundred-dollar Gucci iPod cases? Polyphonic ring tones? Dark matter? The baffling success of Ashlee Simpson? Puggles? This much we know: We don't know squat. Except, of course, that there is one hell of a lot more to know.

Yes, the Bush administration has done more to harm the economy and decimate the national spirit and rape the notion of patriotism than any administration in 100 years. It might very well be true -- hell, we all know it's true -- but is that all there is?

Juicy progress has occurred, despite Dubya and his ilk. Hell, in 1942 you couldn't buy a vibrator to save your life, much less your marriage. People were playing scratchy 78s on their steam-powered turntables and danced in heavy girdles made of bailing wire and lost hopes. Merely uttering the words "double soy mocha latte" in some states would get you shot for being some sort of Communist. Life was brutal. Thongs had yet to be invented. Radiohead didn't exist. Telephones were made of wood and string and lots of yelling. People ate meat from a can. Power steering was science fiction.


This much we know: Progress is measured in fits and hurls and recoils and lurches. We are certainly not where we were, but in some ways, we are stuck there like a pig in quicksand. It's a conundrum. Make that a paradox. A cosmic knock-knock joke. It is merely the way.

Here is some interesting news: Only about 74 percent of Americans call themselves Christian nowadays, down from 86 percent about 15 years ago. What's more, it seems the numbers are dropping steadily, a little less than 1 percent a year. Which means, in about 30 years from now, Christians could be a minority in the United State. What are we to make of this? Here's the most fascinating aspect: God is smiling about it.

Although there's a desperate need to cling on to the old, unenlightened ways, a deep trembling fear of change and progress, a need by the PTB to force everyone into little manageable boxes of identity and function, all while absolutely refusing to allow intellect and gender and belief to be as fluid and fascinating as they so desperately want to be, the good news is, the cat is out of the bag and she's sprinting for the border, singing Led Zep's "Black Dog" and laughing maniacally.

Art will not die. Gay rights marches awkwardly on. Wicca is the fastest-growing religion in America. Sex keeps us more giddy than ever. New galaxies get discovered. Women laugh. Communication evolves. Vibrator quality improves. Wars end. All this pseudo-Christian panic is merely the last spasm of a dying dogma. Which is to say, conservatives may wail and religions may pule, but love winks and shrugs and evolves anyway, despite them both.

You see, magic abounds. Change can blink clumsily to life even in the dankest of corners. Take health care. You will hear much about health care this year. Health care is a nasty, bloated mess, a massive crisis, bigger than any other fiscal issue facing the nation, could very well bankrupt the U.S. government. One reason costs are so high and HMOs are so abusive is because the health industry has powerful lobbyists and the industry CEOs are cronies of the president. What are we to do about this?

Maybe not as much as you might think. Because now a funny thing is happening: Ironically, the powerful crony CEOs of all the other major American corporations, like GM and Wal-Mart and even Starbucks, have become royally furious about how much of their overhead is going to pay for employee health care and are letting Congress feel their wrath, forcing a change. It is the battle of the BushCo cronies!

See, sometimes positive change can happen, even when it's not borne of decent or humanitarian purposes. Of course your current gummint doesn't care a whit about you or your health or well-being. They care about power and money and control. But sometimes even that works out sort of OK. Weird.


A sort of chaotic, forward-lurching equilibrium prevails. Even powerful, seemingly ironclad secrets cannot hold. The Bush administration is the cagiest and most morally abusive in decades, and we've worked like paranoid ferrets to narrow the extent and application of America's landmark laws regarding open government, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Presidential Records Act. In other words, they don't want you to know crap about how deep their lies go.

But look. In one short year, the sneering, all-consuming GOP has gone from master of all domains, from owning every aspect of the federal government and launching multiple failed wars and abusing all laws and spying and wiretapping and torturing and lying, to one of the least stable parties in ages. Scandals, indictments, arrests, Abramoff, Enron, DeLay, thousands of dead U.S. soldiers and nothing to show for it but more enraged terrorists, an economy running on fumes. Regimes built on lies and religious fearmongering never last. It's like a genital rash -- it just seems to take forever to heal.

Are you not reassured? Because this is the amazing thing. There are languages left to learn. Countries you have still not visited. Musical drumbeats you have not felt deep in your tailbone. There are sexual positions and tongue-related sensations and deep longing stares you have yet to hold in your body the way an open palm holds a small bird. It might take another lifetime or three. This is just fine. We have time. Lots of it.

Did you know every religion in the world has some variant of a belief in past lives, in reincarnation? It's true. Most believe that this earthly plane is merely an intense cosmic schoolroom for our spirits, albeit one of the harshest and meatiest and most spasmodically radiant in the galaxies. And yet we keep coming back here, over and over, millions of times, to learn all the aspects, dark and light and murderous and blissful, so we can move to the next level, help the universe hum that much brighter.

My fellow Americans, I am here to tell you I have no freaking idea why it's set up this way. But I can tell you one thing: It sure makes for one hell of a ride.

Thank you and God bless America.

www.sfgate.com