They sure do have the Iraqi “breaking news” ready waaay in advance. Sitting at a coffee shop, I got slapped with an hour long TV special with multiple interviews about the Brothers Hussein, their full biographies, a psychological breakdown, an analysis of their escape strategies, a profile of the shootout, a prophesy-based media analysis of how future news reports will affect future news in Iraq, and a brief discussion of the Rose Garden ceremony tomorrow.

Mission Accomplished!

Obviously it’s unpatriotic to ask, but I am curious: two hundred soldiers from the 101 Airborne, crack anti-terrorist Task Force 20, circling Apache helicopters firing TOW missiles…
and seven guys held them all off for six hours with nothing but small arms fire?

Which must be the reason we had to kill them extra hard rather than get any intelligence from them or put them on trial or use them to find Saddam or even release them on the streets of Baghdad for some Mussolini-style lamppost action. Cause when you have supervillains that powerful holed up in a villa, you gotta blow that shit all the way up on the spot. Otherwise they’d just bust out like Godzilla and stomp the fuck out of Mosul.

Some people like Lambert at Eshaton just don’t understand how to deal with supervillains:

At best, killing Saddam’s sons was a missed opportunity. At worst, it’s the tip of the iceberg of a policy of targeted assassination that perverts the notion of American justice, and will lead to blowback just as certainly as funding Afghan jihaadists did.

Spoilsport.

[clever title jacked from polaroidgirl's dad's friend phil]

At the British Dragonfly Society

[via Sensitive Light]

LA Observed is keeping up with the attention given to Michael Ramirez’s latest deeply confused attempt at conservative editorial cartooning.

For example at the Washington Post. And at the LA Times, where he offers this thoughtful explanation of the cartoon:

“President Bush is the target, metaphorically speaking, of a political assassination because of 16 words that he uttered in the State of the Union,” Ramirez said. “The image, from the Vietnam era, is a very disturbing image. The political attack on the president, based strictly on sheer political motivations, also is very disturbing.”

Apparently Ramirez does not explain why he depicted Iraq as Vietnam and Bush as a Viet Cong guerilla.

Of course conservatives must be blinded with outrage that anyone, right-wing or liberal, could slur the president in this incompetent way. The cries of treason, the patriotic outrage, the, uh…

The “viciousness” is not in Ramirez’s cartoon, but rather in the mindless partisan attacks on the President which dominate the news day after day.

Such high-minded unbending principles.

It’s like Bill K and I always say: Bush is driving one of our two major political parties stark, raving mad.

More
[via Matthew Yglesias ] Eugene Volokh makes this insight:

Seems to me that the Secret Service should be focusing on real threats, not on this.

Or this, or this, or this, or this…
The delicious irony doesn’t make it less bitter.

Job opening:

I am looking for someone who is capable of moving physical objects with his/her mind (telekenetics). This is for scientific experiments to enhance and harness this power. If you are able to move small objects just a little you qualify. This only applys to telekenetics. The job pays $75.00 an hour, 40 hours+ a week. Thank you.

No overtime?

[via polaroidgirl]

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….