SpeedBalling

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I found this fundraising ad (on Washingtonpost.com) to be particularly tasteless.

I am not trying to say that I am shocked at the idea of money driving politics, but that doesn't mean I don't find it reprehensible. In the meantime, this is another reason why I will never be a member of the Democratic Party.

I have said it before, and now I will again: I am busy, and lazy, and I just can't seem to find the time, or the initiative to ever write anything. Luckily though, today is Thursday, which means that tomorrow is (my one) day off, and so I can stay up late drinking, blogging, and watching the Daily Show when it reruns at 1:00am.

Item #1: The Democratic National Convention

I have been actively trying to avoid this for the last week, but it keeps slipping past my defenses, and dragging me in. First it was the phone calls from Boston - "I haven't slept for two days, and there are people driving around in vans, covered with pictures of aborted fetuses, screaming through microphones," or "Barak Obama let me suck his cock, and he even offered to cum in my mouth," etc, etc, et-fucking-cetra. Then I got dragged down to Rock-fucking-Bottom, of all the god forsaken places i hate, and forced to listen to long harangues about the glory of democracy, the fantastic ideals of the Democratic party, the unquestionable integrity of John Kerry, and the evil cynicism of the media's convention coverage. There is a word for this, it slips my mind... Oh yeah - naive. Anyway, thank God for Bloody Marys and IPA.

The main event of the convention, obviously, is the acceptance speech, which was thursday night, and which I was actually interested in watching. Overall I found it to be a passable presentation, which hit most of its marks, and didn't create any heinous fuckups, which is the big thing, because if it did, they would have been replayed every single day until the election. Like most people, after about two minutes I was saying, "yeah, you fought in Vietnam, I caught that the first ten times," but the huge emphasis of the war record was totally in line with my expectations as well. After a bit of digression on the economy, and healthcare, the thing was over, and I was left more or less apathetic.

But Then. They started the fucking music up, and began playing Van Halen's "Dreams," which is basically unintelligible, except for the chorus of "we'll get higher and higher," which is screamed out over-and-over during the song. When I heard that, I was like, "YES! That is exactly what I need! I must get higher!" So I guess the Covention really did inspire me.

Item #2: My Job

On a similar subject - that of "getting higher" - I was talking to my partner for the day, and she is like "yeah, I had a seizure last night - and it wasn't even like I did that much coke."

Meanwhile, this girl, her boyfriend, another kid, and myself are all confirmed as having been hired on for continuing work with this campaign, (more than half the staff is being dropped) and all three of them are serious coke-heads/junkies. What this means, is that either our management has very poor judgment, or the other people working with us must really suck. Like I've said before. Now I know why the Democratic party can't win any fucking elections.

AlterNet has a nice little piece titled The Ratings Mirage, which disects and debunks Fox's claims of ratings superiority.

CNN regularly claims a cume of about 20 percent higher than that of Fox. For instance, in April 2003, during the height of the fighting in Iraq, CNN's cume was significantly higher than Fox's: 105 million viewers tuned into CNN compared to 86 million for Fox. But in the same period, the ratings reported by most media outlets had Fox in the lead, with an average of 3.5 million viewers to CNN's 2.2 million.

It is pretty much spinning the spin, which makes me dizzy. Or maybe that's just my hang-over. Which is somewhere around an 8.2 on the *******-Scale™.

From: Harass the Brass - A website for anarchist military personnel. (If they're out there, they must have had some really shitty guidance councilors!)

The N.Y. TIMES gives front-page prominence to yet another totally unfounded Iraq Story.

The piece in question here was published on July 11, 2004 at the top of the front page. The headline was "Iraq's Rebellion Develops Signs of Internal Rift - Tactics and Goals Split Iraqis and Foreigners." The basic premise of this story, written by Ian Fisher and Edward Wong, is that native Iraqi resistance fighters may be beggining to oppose or even combat the efforts of foriegn fighters who are operating in Iraq. Now, on a personal level, I have no way of assessing the validity of these claims one way or the other, and the problem with this story is not that it is evidently false. The problem is that this entire piece is based on background briefings from military sources, with some very questionable secondary sources used as window dressing, and in totality the entire things amounts to nothing more than speculation - speculation which happens to perfectly serve a "best case scenario" in which victory in Iraq is at hand.

The sources cited by the authors are as follows: (ordered as they appear)
-"Dhary Rasheed, a professor at the University of Baghdad"
-"a young fighter in Falluja whose relatives hold high positions in the resistance"
-Iyad Allawi (from public statements)
-"[a] 25-year-old Sunni insurgent in Baghdad"
-"Hamid al-Bayati, the deputy foriegn minister"
-"Sheik Abdul-Satar Sattar al-Samarrai, a leader of the Muslim Clerics Association"

The nice little quirk about this story is that none of its primary assertions are actually made by named sources, instead they are all attributed to unnamed "experts," a "senior American military official," and "Arab television and web sites."

The later of those seems to be the real primary basis for the assertions made in this article. In particular the "release of a videotape containing threats to kill Abu Musab Zarqawi" is apparently the most convincing indicator of this so called "rift" in the Iraqi resistance. Additionally, the story cites other website postings that supposedly demonstrate some disagreement amongst fighters over tactics and ideology.

Now, on a personal level, I am not especially impressed by this video - which could have been made by anybody with a ski mask, some robes, and an AK-47. Obviously website postings have even less credibility. But even assuming that these aren't CIA plants, or other self-serving forgeries, one has to ask how the N.Y. Times discovered them in the first place. These postings are, after all, on Arabic websites. Does the Times has Arab speakers who routinely scour the internet, making translations of every message board posting, so that english speaking reporters can analyze and report on them? I doubt it. But one assumes that the U.S. intelligence community does have that kind of operation, and that if a "senior American military official" was doing a background briefing for some reporters, he would be more than happy to provide them with the appropriate documentation supporting whatever story he was trying to sell that day.

What we have then, is a story whose primary assertions are all based upon documentation selectively provided by U.S. inteligence, and an analysis of that documentation that is very obviously self-serving to the U.S. military, and the administration. That is not journalism, it is a reprinted press release, which is unfit for me to wipe my ass with.

[I would link to the story, but unfortunately the TIMES only allows free access to articles published within the last 7 days]

Too much work, and no vacation,
Deserves at least a small libation.
So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses;
Work's the curse of the drinking classes.
--Oscar Wilde

One day I'm loaded - next day I'm broke
Spent all my money on Whiskey 'n' coke
--The Beautiful South

The Arabian Candidate - Paul Krugman (N.Y. Times)

The Arabian candidate wouldn't openly help terrorists. Instead, he would serve their cause while pretending to be their enemy. [...] Meanwhile, he would lead America into a war against a country that posed no imminent threat.

I'm sure you can see where this is headed. PK really needs to lighten up a little - smoke a bowl or something.

<Demential> they substitute the country responsible with a different every time, first afghan, then iraq, then syria, now iran, after that canada

<luckythekitten> thatd be tight if we took over canada

One of my related searches is "crack cocaine." CRACK-FUCKING-COCAINE!!! Wow.

...Luckily there are plenty of 'tards posting online personals.

Take this one, from Hot or Not:

I'm a 20 y/o Christian & a college softball player. I'm honest & some what [emphasis added] intelligent.:) I luv meeting new people & playin most all sports. Or jus gettin dirty outdoors! If U wanna know more, email me!

Does she mean "somewhat?" Is that supposed to be ironic? Judging by the fact that this girl is a "christian" I kind of doubt it.

Another:

Hi! I love my friends! I enjoy talking to every person.. Jesus is my friend. and hmm i like music. Preferably punk. Oh and I love teaching the little babies at church. My friends and God make me the happiest..umm yes..woot.

Somebody needs to take their Ritalin, or give it to me.

This is a limited release documentary about the Clinton impeachment circus, which looks to be very interesting. Although it is clearly going to be pretty biased, it will definitely be the kind of bias I like.

You can view a trailer here.

This film will only be playing at the Fox Tower Cinema, in Portland, starting September 3.

I don't know why I am even bothering to post this, since it is really degrading and humiliating to myself as a human being. But oh well.

I was bored this morning, and so I spent my time churning out a crappy, super-repetative dance track.

You can down it here: donkey.mp3

The Tape Starts: A door is opened, and whoever is holding the camera unleashes the dog (which appears to be a vicious and frenzied Pit Bull) on the "prisoner", who appears to be sleeping.


The tape is fuzzy here, but where I have added the red circle, you can see the dog locked onto the "prisoner's" neck. At this point the "prisoner" is still struggling, trying to push the dog away, and screaming some kind of high pitched gibberish - probably begging the camera man to call the dog off.


Here the "prisoner" is motionless, and the dog has lost interest. One can only speculate as to what condition the "prisoner" is in at this point.

I still have many questions regarding this video:
-Who is this man on the tape? He looks middle eastern, and on the video, you can see that he has a look of haggered fatigue, and appears to be sweaty, unshaven, and unbathed.
-Is this tape legitimate? Is it staged? Or is it something else?
-Was my source telling the truth? Is Military Iteligence using secret safehouses - outside of the normal areas of army control - to interogate, and incarcerate prisoners - either from the Iraq war, or from the "war on terror?"

Ultimately, only time may yield the answers. I have been unable to relocate my source, as of now, but rest assured, I will continue to pursue this story until I know The Truth.

As previously mentioned, I have just had come into my possession an original video tape, alledgedly showing the abuse of an unknown prisoner, in American custody, in Iraq. I will post some pictures from said video shortly, but I warn you that they are shocking, disgusting, and certainly not for the faint of heart.

How I got this tape, is a story unto itself.

It happened completely by accident. I was minding my own business, and really doing nothing at all - just hanging out with a friend who had recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, and a few of his buddies. They were trading tales of their time over there, and one of them mentioned the fact that he had been assigned to perform guard duty at a private residence outside of the "green zone" in Baghdad.

"It was terrible," he said, "those fucking arabs never sleep. Shit man - suicide bombs, mortars, machine guns - it never fucking stopped. Naturally, we couldn't sleep either. We'd be up days at a time. Then some of our own guys started to crack and shit got really fucked up!"

"How did you get a bullshit duty like that in the first place?" I asked.

"Fucking M.I." he replied, "Bunch of fucking pricks. They were using that place to break guys down. They would run these bastards in and out of there all the time - always with bags over their heads. Who knows who was in there - Saddam, Osama - fuck, it could'ave been anybody."

"Why don't you show him the video?" My friend chimed in.

"Yeah," one of the others said, "they were always taping everything, but they held onto those tapes real tight. But fuck them. One day, I grabbed one - just out of curiosity, and shit - it is fucked up!"

My friend's buddy, who had been telling the story, went over to the shelf, and after rummaging through some tapes, he pulled one out, and put it in for me to watch.

After seeing it, I knew I had to have it, and I asked him if I could get a copy.

"Shit, you can have the original. Hell," he said, pausing and making a face, "I'm not into that sick shit."

"Great, how much do you want for it?" I asked.

"How about a 'teener'?"

"What's that?"

"Never mind," he said, "how much cash do you have?"

I rummaged through my pockets and came up with $23 dollars, which he readily took.

"Take the tape when you leave," he told me. And then he disappeared out the door, and I haven't seen him since.

I am in the process of getting this Cameron Diaz "S&M" video that everyone is talking about, not that I really care about it, but I'm just trying to keep my customers satisfied.

On the subject of libel and slander: I have also had come into my possession an exclusive and unprecedented videotape of Iraqi prisoner abuse, from which I will shortly be posting screenshots, and if I have the time/technology, the entire video as well.

Like the Diaz sex-tape, the story behind this prisoner abuse video is twisted and sordid, and the methods with which it has been brought to light are undoubtedly just as savage. But in the end, it will have a similar effect - providing the public an invaluable service.

Thanks to Howard Kurtz's column @ washingtonpost.com I have been turned on to this fantastic story about dirty politics, hookers, blackmail, criminal indictments, etc... Which makes it, like, four of my favorite subjects, all combined into one fantastic tale. I think I may need a clean pair of shorts.

You can read it all, repleat with gory detail, at the N.Y.Post.

On a side note:

Kurtz asserts that we should call "swing voters" the "Purple People, since they belong to neither red or blue states," which I believe is a term coined by "crazy" Chris Matthews. All I can say is - Why Howard, Why?

It should be the policy of all, even semi-respectable bloggers, not to encourage Matthews in his demented madness. It is like the zoo, with the signs telling you not to feed the monkeys. The more you encourage them, the harder they are to keep under control.

It doesn't get much better than this - to bad it wasn't Oxy, but still, "Xanax, Tylenol with codeine, and Ambien" are pretty damn good. I could sure use some.

The New Yorker has the shit here.

[An interesting subplot on this is that during the Iraq war Powell was quoted as saying something to the affect that "everyone" on the presidential staff was taking Ambien (a prescription sleeping aid) in order to cope with the stress and long hours. Now, who exactly was prescribing them all that Ambien?]

I would just like to say, for the record, that certain individuals, who mocked me for supporting Edwards - while they were backing Dean - can now kiss my ass.

Yes, that's crow. Eat it bitch!

And, of course, everyone is talking about the Post's ignominious cover story. [wow. pimping the vocab hard.]

My guess would be that the Kerry campaign leaked the story either to locate an unauthorized Post source on their staff, or possibly just to burn the Post out of spite.

The other distinct possibility is that the editorial staff of the Post ran amok on booze, and crack cocaine. Spent the entire weekend pawning office equipment to buy more rock, hookers, and goats. Then, by late Monday, they realized they were finished, and decided to go out with a bang.

Truthfully, the latter may not be a distinct possibility, but at least it's what I would have done.