San Francisco is now officially a suburb of Silicon Valley.

I think the mild schadenfreude I feel is best personified by a young gentleman who rode his motorcycle down from The City to visit friends in LA. He kept his bright purple leather jacket on the whole evening and he didn’t say much. Something about how the party we were at reminded him of the Bay Area, except it was like that every night. And also that you should never ever call The City “Frisco.”

That’s San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area to you, son.

By contrast, I think this is one of the things I’ve come to most appreciate about Los Angeles — it’s almost impossible to meaningfully insult it. The whole place is shrouded in a smog of insults, a weird mixture of disgust, fear and envy. The root mythology is horror and deception — when the pueblo was founded, they were already calling it Los Diablos.

But this soft bigotry of lowered expectations makes every wonderful thing here feel like a discovered secret. Last week it was Little Joy, Paru’s, and the roof of the Figueroa.

I do {heart} the wee peninsula, especially as I sit in front of two fans, squinting out the window towards something beige, remembering a particularly delightful 65 degree summer… If only I could have left my overactive sweat glands in Frisco.

William Kristol:

Karl Rove is a genius…

George W. Bush is a genius…

the president ordered his White House staff to bollix up its explanation…

As we say, George W. Bush is a genius…

driving one of our two major political parties…stark, raving mad….

if the Democrats prefer instead to act as a pathologically disgruntled lunatic fringe…

That muffled sound you hear coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the sound of George W. Bush chuckling at the success of his nefarious scheme.

Ah. So that’s what the muffled sound is.

Good to know.

More
In this Washington Post story, a Texan interior designer recounts the moment he knew he could believe in George W’s nefarious schemes:

“Everyone else was drinking and partying, and George was fixed on unraveling this spool of thread, part of the puzzle, and he unrolled and unrolled, and when the spool was empty, there was the answer,” says Turner. “I’ll never forget it, his focus was such. And that is the focus I know he brings to this giant task of his.”

Unraveling, unraveling…

I’ve been looking around for some kind of intelligent conservative response to the crumbling war propaganda. For example this Washington Post story which points out how most of the major reasons for war have been “discredited” — the polite term.

But the only things I’ve found are an eye-rolling “16 words” and a grim warning of a growing liberal insanity provoked by Bush. Weak. But I have to say, that all the right-wingers helpfully making “McGovern” warnings about anti-war democrats are pretty cute. (Re-elect Nixion? Seriously??)

So not only did I fail to find any thoughtful conservative response to the war lies, I found out (at Drudge Report of all places) that LA Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez finally pushed his special brand of inane idiocy so far over the edge that the secret service is offended.

“We take all images such as this very seriously,” a top secret service source who requested anonymity said from Washington. “Regardless of the politics behind any speech, images of the president, such as this, raise concern.”

No reaction from the LA Times yet. LA Observed noticed. And the National Review already took a shot at the editors while somehow forgetting to mention right-wing cartoonist Ramirez. Go figure. Of course the Times editors are irresponsible for publishing Ramirez at all. I suppose they’ve been using him as a talisman to ward off accusations of liberal bias? I wonder how that’s working out for them….

The cartoon is not only tasteless, it’s an interesting symptom of how war believers are dealing with the increasing revelation and discussion of the lies leading up to our current guerrila conflict. Ramirez is referring to a pulitzer prize winning photo of South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong officer in Saigon on February 1, 1968.

So not only does the cartoon depict Bush getting executed, it depicts him as a Viet Cong officer getting shot by the American-backed South Vietnamese police. Like the man said, revisionist history.

“Mr. Nixon said that “we are moving swiftly” toward “peace with honor, the kind of peace that will last.”

of the Transportation Club of Houston

R.N. Jarl, 1965-66

Finally read White Noise last week. Suburban refugees getting chased back and forth by a deadly cloud. Funny funny stuff. Little did I realize how hard it was to get the attention of a toxic airborne event when your really need one.

Spent last night from dusk to dawn putting pasta and steak sauce in double sets of NYLOFUME® bags (“to protect food and other commodities during fumigations with VIKANE® gas fumigant”). The natural gas was shut off on shedule, fine fine. And then exterminators arrived. We discussed hiding places for the keys. We checked around downstairs.

Of them asked about the trench. There was very clearly no trench. “Mire” said another of the men below the deck pointing at the area where a trench would have gone. “Todo el esto aquí.”

They kind of implied that maybe I should really be getting to work on that trench. And that ivy. In fact I had better seriously buckle down with a damn sharp hoe if I was going to get that ivy cut back in good time, they implied.

“Trench?” I implored.

It was no good. We were trenchless. The sandbags would roll away. A seal could not be made. The poison would just fitter away, killing something without any measurable return on investment. Pointless.

The four of them sat on the curb, eating pistachios, one of them on a cell phone trying to work the angles. I listlessly sealed up the last of the NYLOFUME® bags, just in case. Like laying out victory champagne for a candidate who was clearly loosing…. An hour later they left. They had a sense of resignation, and a little pity.

We do not get our toxic cloud.

The lake we’re going to at allows boats and watercraft with their economy-boosting fluids and beneficial synthetic secretions. However the flesh of mortals is not to touch the water. Swimming is forbidden. ¡Ninguna Natación Aquí! The water is for drinking.

What if you throw up while on your watercraft? I don’t know who to ask about this. But I do know that while we are out, our trusty double-layered NYLOFUME® will keep our food, feed, drugs and medicinals sealed away from any wayward poisons.

1947 was the year this issue of Starting Comics came out (#44, featuring the Fighting Yank).

It was also the year of Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sighting, the first official “flying saucer.”

Also the year of the Maurey Island Incident, with the first modern “men in black.”

Also the year of the Roswell Incident, and the interweaving of technological otherness with national security, atomic warfare, and the epistemological wobbliness of the Fallen Object.

Also the year of the National Security Act and the creation of the CIA.

Many other painful delights at the Golden Age Comic Book Cover Gallery [ via metafilter ]
The crime and horror comics of the 50′s? Find out what little Richie Cunningham was really thinking when he sang Blueberry Hill. Oh dear….

Maybe it started as a blunt commentary by Orange County denizens on the idea of publicly subsidized rail transit and other such hippie nonsense? But now it looks like a family-friendly butt fiesta which sells out the entire day’s trains.

This Saturday, June 12, all day. For those with a sense of daring-do, the “night mooning” session involves flashlights and coleman lanterns.

Mugs Away Saloon
27324 Camino Capistrano, #102
Laguna Niguel

It’s fascinating to watch Bush supporters try to deal with an admission of his deceit. So little personal agency ascribed to our once-decisive Leader. So many unseen forces at work.
Eugene Volokh on the initial CBS story:

(1) the allegation is about “the White House,” not “Bush,” and (2) the allegation is that the White House knew that the information “might not be true,” not that it was “false.”

I haven’t been following the uranium/Niger/Iraq/State-of-the-Union story closely, but I’m perfectly prepared to believe that there were serious intelligence screw-ups, stretches by government officials, or even intentional attempts to mislead people on some people’s part. Among other things, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that because that’s the way governments (or, for that matter, human beings) often operate. If this happened, then it’s bad, and it’s right that people should try to get to the bottom of things.

See there? It was the White House giving the State of the Union address, not the President. And even if it “”might not be true”, it was still just a wee error. Perhaps a “screw-up.” Might go so far as to call it a “stretch.” It certainly was not a deception with thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. It was rather just a gentile “attempt to mislead.” It wasn’t the most carefully studied speech in the world, but rather something vague done “on some people’s part.”

It’s almost like Volokh is describing George W Bush as some kind of expensive but poorly functioning puppet.

Imagine that.

Glenn Reynolds:

I probably should take these more seriously, just because the mainstream media are pretending to. But it’s hard to take it seriously when it looks like the same bogus crap from the same desperate people, who — as Randy Barnett notes here — want to blur the line between “mistakes” and “lies” in a way that they certainly never did during the Clinton Administration.

It’s partisan backstabbing, pure and simple, and it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Ah, yes. Bogus crap. Desperate people. Clinton….

mistake : lie
cum stain : nuclear weapons
blowjob : ongoing warfare and bloody reconstruction
potayto : potahto….

Besides, it’s not even worth taking seriously. There’s no reason to discuss it. Why talk about it at all? What is there to even talk about?? Let’s just not talk about it!!

Since Bush and Rice are now blaming pointedly mentioning George Tenet, I wonder if the CIA is going to agree that this is nothing serious and not worth talking about? [also Kos]. Maybe if everyone only talks about it in passive voice.

Something was done on someone’s part and people should get to the bottom of things. And it’s partisan bogus crap. Shhhhhh…

No seriously. What the fuck is going on?

The purpose of the three day secret conference in January 2000, which was monitored by Malaysian police at the CIA’s request, was to discuss details of how the hijackers should train and hide in the US and how the attacks should be carried out.

“This was the first planning meeting of the 9/11 operation. It was to review the progress they had achieved on the operation and to map out their future course of action,” Rohan Gunaratna, a leading expert on Osama bin Laden, said after appearing before the US commission investigating the attacks.

Agonist is treating this story as suspect, because it seems to imply that the CIA was aware of “Operation Holy Tuesday” almost two years in advance?

Lambert at Eshaton runs with this for a minute and speculates that if it were verifiable, the sudden admission of Bush “misspeaking” about uranium from Niger would be a strategy of hiding massively terrible news by publicizing some merely bad news. Of course the way things are going, this would be an incredibly stupid strategy.

All the Macintosh key sequences.
All of them.

(Apparently setting the date to 20 Sep 1989 on a IIci and booting with cmd-opt-c-i gets a graphical easter egg. Hot damn!)

[ via slorp ]