Al Franken Gets Kinetic

 

I’m Mad Too, Carl

OK, not really. I’ll be a little disappointed in a week when the big top comes down on Carl “Clownshoes” Paladino. In the meantime, here’s some Rachel Maddow:

 

 

Mad does mean crazy as a loon, right?

New Blog to my List

Adding a blog I never read, but should have been because they seem brilliant at any meal anytime. Loved this post proclaiming Americans as idiots. That seems a little harsh. But, I’m an American, and an idiot. Some of the folks in this piece live on rungs lower than I, though.

So let's see...they like Social Security and Medicare, but they want spending cut to the bone. They want Washington to be involved in schools, but they want Washington out of their schools. They want Washington to help reduce poverty, but they don't want social programs for "Those People."

These are the people who think they are well-informed because they watch Fox and listen to Beck, Limbaugh and Savage.

Here is the brilliant rant that led me from Tbogg over to Brilliant at Breakfast:

We are a profoundly ignorant. People don't know anything about their own religions. We know little of our own history, let alone our history in context with the rest of the world. We worship sports heroes who torture dogs, but we point at scientists and laugh. A profoundly messed-up woman like Christine O'Donnell can run on a platform of "See? I can't manage my finances either. I'm you." We had eight years of a dry drunk as president because people thought he was the guy they'd want to have a beer with -- as if that were ever going to happen. Now there are people who would vote to give the nuclear codes to an aging high school mean girl because they'd like to fuck her -- as if that's ever going to happen. Smart people are regarded with scorn as "elites." Ignorance is regarded as a virtue.
This is how an empire dies. And we are going to be around to see it.

And from Tom Engelhardt:

If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that “homeland” -- a distinctly un-American word -- would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally -- only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short -- that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.

And just to make sure future opponents are well armed:

The Obama administration is laying out a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar military aid package for Pakistan as it presses the Islamabad government to step up the fight against extremists there and in neighboring Afghanistan, U.S. officials say.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi were to unveil the plan Friday at the end of the latest round of high-level U.S.-Pakistani strategic talks here, the officials said.

What could go wrong?

Pakistan shut down the Torkham border crossing, the most important NATO supply into Afghanistan, on Thursday in apparent protest of a NATO helicopter attack that killed three Pakistani soldiers on the frontier. It was the third such incursion into Pakistan in less than a week.

The other NATO supply line through Pakistan remained open — the Chaman crossing in Baluchistan, where it seemed likely the tankers were heading.

A lengthy closure of Torkham would place intense strain on the US-Pakistani relationship and hurt the Afghan war effort. But a long shutdown continued to be seen as unlikely.

In spite of our country being geographically challenged we have somehow stumbled into the appropriate region.