Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to?

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Minstrel Boy from his new home at the GNB put up an interesting but disturbing post last Friday about the alleged bones of Geronimo being used by white Ivy League assholes like Prescott and George W. Bush as mere props in their Skull and Bones rituals. The descendants of Geronimo are suing for the return of the bones whether or not they belong to the famed Apache guerilla fighter. Here's Stevie's solution to the problem:

If it is the skull of that great freedom fighter (yes, one man's freedom fighter is another man's renegade terrorist) I would suggest the Henry II solution. After he incited the murder of St. Thomas A'Beckett the Pope gave him a penance. He walked barefoot from London to Canterbury, wearing a sackcloth and a noose around his neck. He was to beg the forgiveness of every priest he met along the way. He was also given 20 "symbolic" lashes by the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

Walking from New Haven to New Mexico barefoot, begging the pardon of every Native American they meet along the way would be a great way to test the commitment of these Ivy League assholes.

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Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly is puzzled. By what?

(T)he response to Obama's housing plan. There seem to be a whole lot of people who think that it's mainly designed to help out people who knowingly got themselves into trouble by living beyond their means, while those of us who were financially responsible are left out in the cold. (There's a decent sample of these reactions here. Sample: "Obama has one word for those who didn't get in over their heads during the recent housing boom and have paid their mortgages on time: Suckers!")

I just don't get this. Obama's plan is not primarily aimed at people who acted irresponsibly.

Obama's plan is neither a stopgap nor a panacea for all our housing ills but from what I've read of it, it's an extremely cost-effective first strike to curb two runaway problems: Foreclosure and plummeting property values that neighborhood foreclosures obviously bring about. Hilzoy explains this in plain English to help along those who have neither the time nor the aptitude to understand President Obama's housing plan.

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Speaking of the President, I have a question: How come we're not screaming our heads off about the proposed 30,000 troop surge about to go to Afghanistan like we were screaming about Bush's 20,000 (later revealed to be 31,500) surge in Iraq a couple of years ago?

Need a reason to scream? Here's one, courtesy of Jeff Huber in the pages of at-Largely:

As foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter tells us, Obama was ready to support the full 30,000 troop escalation, endorsed by Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus. A hunch must have told Obama to ask one more question, because he called McKiernan directly and asked him how he planned to use those additional 30,000 troops. McKiernan couldn’t give him a straight answer.

Obama’s hunch must have generated in a Jan. 28 meeting with the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. According to NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, Obama asked his service chiefs “What is the end game” in Afghanistan? His service chiefs replied, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”

In a related story, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports that Danielle Pietka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, worries that Afghanistan is a "war that we may walk away from.”

OK, first of all, why the fuck is Obama listening to a closeted warhawk and perennially wrong and number-massaging son of a bitch like Petraeus?

Secondly, why commit tens of thousands of more troops to yet another quagmire from which we may have to walk away, a nation that's suddenly, with the success of the first Glorious Surge, become more fatal to US troops than even Iraq?

Thirdly, how is the Pentagon not having an endgame scenario that's cognizant of any political objectives an incentive for sending even the original 17,000 troops after going on 8 years?

Fourthly, how completely fucked up is Bush's forgotten war that there's still a Taliban with which to negotiate?

Iraq has been called our generation's Vietnam countless times but what about Afghanistan? Well, one thing, at least, could be said about the ultimately failed Vietnam war: At least it had a political objective in stopping the spread of Communism in SE Asia. Afghanistan hasn't even that one dimensional, paper-based, desk-bound objective.

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The Rude Pundit, as always, finds the incongruous, the sand in the Vaseline, the monkey in the wench, and so forth. He doesn't often post pictures but the Rude One has a couple of priceless ones that really are at odds with eachother: The down-to-earth former Preznit walking into a hardware store asking for a job and the reality of how down-to-earth he really is in his own neighborhood.

Btw, no takers, yet, for his preznidenshull mem-mwors, so I'm not feeling too bad about not yet getting an agent for my novel.

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Since I'm about as interested in the Oscars as I am in Karl Rove's toe jam, I generally pass an apathetic eye the next day over the news to see which movies and actors won the major awards. Better than the news is Canuck Firestarter 5 who summed up the evening more perfectly than even two-time winner Sean Penn's, "Commie homo-loving sons of guns":

Imagine how pissed off the right-wing knuckledraggers will be today. After last nights Academy Awards, their hatred of Hollywood will be that much more refined. The top 3 awards go to a female actress who portrayed a guard at the Auschwitz Holocaust camp, an actor who played a role as California's first openly gay elected official, and a film with a cast of brown skinned people who don't talk like they do.

As a final kick in the teeth, the Best Supporting Actor role went to a guy who died after a drug overdose and never even seen the completed film he starred in. It's as if last nights script was written especially for them!

Yep, the Limbaughs and Hannitys and O'Reillys will be on fire today.

If you put your ear to your right speaker, you can actually hear a distant sound that's reminiscent of Jiffy Pop. That's the adorable sound of pinheads exploding en masse.

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Rounding out the list is this amazing story on DKos about coldhearted corporate cocksuckery at its finest, one that makes me reconsider whether there's any validity to the rumors of Ray Kroc's devil worship.

Imagine being a minimum wage-earning schlep at McDick's who sees a thug slapping a woman around, running to her aid, throwing out the thug then getting shot multiple times when the prick returned?

Think that qualifies as a bad day at the office? It gets worse for the poor Good Samaritan: Since the shooting last summer, and after racking up over $300,000 in medical bills over the course of three abdominal surgeries, imagine McDonald's and their insurance carrier then denying your worker's compensation claim on the dodgy legal argument that you didn't incur your injuries within the parameters of your job description. Such devotion to both their customers and employees!

Yeah, I can understand how they'd need to pinch pennies in these tough times, considering that those artery-clogging pieces of shit saw profits rise by 80% last year, which was $4.3 billion.