anna missed

From down Portland way, some very innovative & lyrical phrasing. Like….wow.

From Talking Points Memo:

The country woke this morning to the news of a profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone with quote after quote of the general and his aides dissing top Obama Administration officials, as well as the president himself. After a day-long media freak-out, McChrystal is set to meet with the president at the White House tomorrow with Robert Gibbs having pointedly left the door open to the general losing his job. All this comes at a time when the Afghan war is not going particularly well.

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The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is found in Title 10, United States Code, Chapter 47, beginning with section 801. Article 88 is Title 10 U.S.C. section 888, and currently states–

“Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

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According to the law, General Stanley McChrystal needs to be court-martialed,  after either resigning his commission, or being fired by the Obama administration. And lets hope he packs up that shitty COIN strategy along with all his other baggage as he walks out the door.

Here’s high school journalist Kieth Wagner interviewing  Arizona State Senator (and candidate for AZ State Superintendent of Public Instruction) John Huppenthal, about the legislatures recent vote to cut career and technical education funding by 99.9%

Obviously this child doesn’t have a clue about journalism or how journalism works in America. It’s probably a lucky thing that this happened to him when it could still be written off as a “youthful indiscretion”, because it’s no doubt already killed off any real chances later in life for a career in journalism. Because as it stands, this boy has flagrantly and capriciously tarnished the reputation of a serious adult statesman, right  in his own high office with the publicity seeking “gottcha” cameras rolling, no less”. I don’t know where he could have gotten such a crazy idea, unless maybe he saw Helen Thomas on TeeVee badgering the president about some insignificant detail about how to win the War On Terror.

This monumental six story $700,000 creation at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe Ohio:

Was destroyed by a lightning strike last night:

Josh Marshall is coining a new neologism,  “manizer” as a means to describe whats happening to South Carolina Republican Nikki Haley in her run for governor. So far, it seems that several Republican operatives have come out publicly, claiming that they personally, have had sexual affairs with Ms Haley. While this is a common method of ritual defamation – especially of political figures, to be then publicly flogged as a “womanizer”. Usually this is a right wing means to attack the left on moral grounds, but what makes this case especially interesting is that it’s  Republican floggers on Republican flogged sort of affair.

While it makes a certain amount of linguistic sense to legitimize the neologism as simply reversing the gender of “womanize” around to “manize”, in  order to define the new circumstance. But, in this case I have to wonder whether the circumstance itself trumps a simple reversal because it is itself so unique – a series of married, male, and known Republican operatives volunteering confessions of having a sexual affair, without, I may add any sense of being in any way, victimized by the affair. Which is not so far off from a bunch of boys (in the same click) in the high school bathroom inventing sexual encounters in order to ruin some girls reputation in order to banish her from the click. It’s the internal character of this that might have the ability to alter the coinage of the term to mean a manner of infighting, since the players are within the same group as opposed to opposite parties.

Unless of course,  Nikki Haley could be defined as not being a real part of the same group, but as a member of another alien group posing as a member of the group. Like if she were really something like, I dunno, a “fucking raghead” or something. Then sure, the “manizer” label, like the “womanizer” label fits just fine.

by Love Land, produced by “Coxsone” Dodd, Studio One.

Some velvet horn work here.

What This Country Needs Is Foo,

The Eddie DeLange Orchestra, vocals by Elisse Cooper

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A while ago, a friend of mine gave me all his dad’s old 78 rpm records and one of them was the above “What This Country Needs Is Foo”. These days the word foo is still floating around in several forms, such as in the rock band Foo Fighters, the expression Foobar (or F.U.B.A.R), or as a term in computer talk to represent a particular part of system – but I had no idea that the word was used clear back in the thirties, and that it evidently was a popular expression.

The word foo apparently originated in the depression era cartoon strip Smokey Stover by Bill Holman. Holman’s cartoons were notable for his predilection for word games, puns, and visual sign gags, and after (so he says) he saw the word FOO signed on the bottom of a Chinese vase, the word became a ubiquitous stand in for other words and inside jokes, such as “many men smoke, but foo man chew”. The above recording from 1938 obviously owes a lot to Holman’s popularization of the term, but the story doesn’t end there because the word FOO marched on past its original novelty, and has expanded itself into a multifaceted signifier – of for the most part, the unknown, the unidentifiable, and/or the the absurd.

After the depression, the word FOO found itself going to war where it was reincarnated in a U.S. Army animated short The Three Brothers where a character named Fubar (brother of Snafu and Tarfu) decrying the ill effects of incompetence on the fighting force. The combination of FOO with the word BAR, or NO FOO started a process whereby FOOBAR became the “backronym”  F.U.B.A.R. or “fucked up beyond all recognition” that is common today. I guess this is a little like the brand FORD being backroynmed into the joke Fix Or Repair Daily.

But that’s not all, because FOO found another application during the war years. Army radar specialists and fans of of the original Holman cartoons, began to use the term FOO to describe images they couldn’t definitely identify on their radar screens as FOO FIGHTERS. Supposedly, these phantom enemy mirages that appeared on radar screens were also often “things” seen by friendly pilots that they themselves couldn’t identify. Most of the descriptions (“bright glowing objects that followed the aircraft, then flew off at astronomical speed”) of what all the pilots were then calling FOO FIGHTERS, matches rather seemlessly with descriptions of what today would be called U.F.O.s.

Funny, how a word – that’s not even in my dictionary – that’s been around for almost 80 years, and assumed the role of a kind of universal signifier of things just out of rational reach like, absurdity, out of control, nonsense, otherworldly, anonymous, U.F.O., or just plain messed up – is a word that itself just can’t quite find it’s way into a state of official legitimacy. So it is then, that FOO has and will, always remain in its own special and exclusive category of FOO. The rare and ubiquitous intimate other.

They’re takin’ back America, one colored child’s face at a time.

A state firmly in the grip of malignant and militant infantilism.

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WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Israel to conduct a “prompt, impartial and transparent” investigation that complies with international standards and get the facts out as soon as possible. When asked Clinton would not say whether the US would be involved in any investigation of the fatal showdown on the flotilla.

The Israeli government maintains that they have every right to defend themselves and asserts they needed to inspect the boat to make sure the activists were not bringing in weapons. Thousands of rockets have been indiscriminately fired into Israel from Gaza in recent years.

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From Juan Cole:

The sloppy Israeli propaganda effort against the Free Gaza humanitarian flotilla has been so bad that the pictures released by the Israeli army have been tagged by alert bloggers as forgeries, some of them having been on the Web for years. This site alleges that many of the pictures put out by Israel purporting to show arms on the aid ship still contained internal tags allowing them to be identified as old photos from years ago. Even if the charges of forgery are false, the photos show chains, sticks, an axe– things that would be on any ship.

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And as also noted by Glenn Greenwald today:

(2) Reporters Without Borders notes that, as of yesterday, Israel continued to detain most journalists on the ships, including their film and cameras, thus preventing any of them from disputing Israeli propaganda; as the NYT reported, Israel was also “refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel’s version of events.”  Manifestly, all that was done to ensure that the highly selective and edited video released by the IDF would shape the narrative of what happened and could not be challenged in the first few days of reporting.

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Sure, let the people already controlling, parsing, and disseminating the information of what happened control the investigation as well. It’s not like they’ve never done it before. Nothing like a nice whitewash to serenade the tribes back to normalcy.

Credibility is the new damned.

UPDATE:

Braveheart Harry Reid joins the chorus  demanding a whitewash.

“Israel has pledged to carry out a transparent and thorough investigation of this incident, and I look forward to its findings,” Reid’s statement concludes, without mentioning that Israel has rejected any international probes undertaken by independent bodies.