If anyone has tickets to see Radiohead on their current North American tour, feel free to make me jealous by telling me how psyched you are to see them.
I’m listening to a bootleg of their show in Boston this past Sunday, and damn the new songs sound good. I saw ’em right after Hail to the Thief came out at the Tweeter Center in 2003, and I been hankerin’ to catch ’em again.
I think Pastor Swank has gone really crazy this time. I mean, he’s gone so crazy, that he’s starting to turn sane. Witness the title of this column from a couple of days ago:
GET US OUT OF IRAQ
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo!
But don’t worry, we shan’t remain in the Twilight Zone for long. For as the first few grafs of his piece indicate, Swank is still completely bonkers:
“Support our Troops� doesn’t look the same to me anymore. I support them in legitimate combat. But I think that supporting them now is enabling the enemy. Therefore, I don’t want to do that. When I support the US troops, I want to support our US troops.
Nope, I got no idea what he’s talking about either. It’s good to see that P-Swank’s short bout with sanity hasn’t scarred him permanently or made him a half-competent writer or anything.
Thanks to Steve-o Benen for pointing us to this Focus on the Family Action Alert on the anti-gay marriage amendment. Here is the key excerpt (my emphasis):
Getting Iraq settled and moving toward a civil order is very important. Getting gasoline prices back down to affordable levels is very important. But to some degree, it’s all important, because it all relates back to the family and the household. But if the family is itself being undermined at its foundational level, then do we really care what the price of gas is?
Now this is something I don’t understand- how the hell does same-sex marriage affect straight peoples’ families? I mean, will the mere possibility of being able to marry another dude be enough to lure upstanding conservative dads away from their families in pursuit of some hot man-love?
 …
Actually, I think I just answered my own question. Now I see why they hate gay marriage so much.
Here’s some guy named Seixon, who’s suddenly all over the right-blogdoodle apropos the Canadian terrorists story. That’s the one with the Canadian Muslims and the fertilizer.
Not a single prominent liberal blog has even written any kind of real post on the subject. The conservative blogs are all over it this morning, where are the liberal blogs? The predictable georgia10 at DailyKos offers this, finally, after several hours without mentioning it:
Seventeen suspected terrorists were arrested in Canada today; they allegedly planned to use 3 tons of explosive material to blow up a building. And how many times was Canada mentioned during the “border security” debate?
That’s all this story merits, blaming politicians for not taking the border with Canada seriously, even though everyone knows that people like georgia10 don’t perceive there is any real terrorist threat. Atrios, nothing; ThinkProgress, nothing; The Left Coaster, nothing; Crooks & Liars, nothing; and Talking Points Memo, nothing. Why not? Doesn’t terrorism in Canada concern any of them?
Is it perhaps because the story goes against many of the liberal dogmas? Doesn’t this demonstrate that these partisan liberal voices don’t give a damn about terrorism, even while it continues to pop up in places where it doesn’t fit into their propaganda of Blame America First? I wonder what Michael “There Is No Terrorist Threatâ€? Moore has to say about…
Okay. Now, you guys always say that Muslims are trying to take over the world.
One would think that this would be a difficult plan, considering the size of the world and the powerful nations that control it. But clearly all it takes to force Western civilization to its knees is a couple of exploded buses and the occasional alleged half-baked plan to make a bomb out of nitrogen fertilizer.
It’s kind of like World War One, when the Kaiser blew up a couple of London buses and was caught planning to blow up a Paris office building. Both nations would have surrendered if America hadn’t entered the war and bombed a Berlin taxi and a couple of newsstands in Munich. Civilization hung in the balance there for awhile, but Germany folded like a rickety card table.
Then there Was World War Two, when the Nazis blew up a Kosher deli in Strasbourg and terrorized London with a protracted campaign of bombing a couple of buses once and almost attacking an unspecified target every two or three years. Once again America came to the rescue, destroying a greengrocer’s in Hamburg and several furniture stores in Cologne and Berlin. Japan was paralyzed by a threat of satchel charges left in rail stations.
From Varifrank, who’s also suddenly all over the right-blogowumpus:
While were all chattering away about the “Terrible Mexican border Situation” or “Harriet Miers” or the “UAE controlling our ports” or “Muhammad as a Cartoon” or “The NSA is listening to our phone calls”, other people in our communities were working quietly behind the scenes in an effort to kill us. All those made up nightmares pale in comparison to what these people could have accomplished had our professionals not kept their eyes on the ball.
And boys and girls I need to remind you… this was only one cell.
And there are more out there, just waiting for the right moment.
Aieee. Frankly, America and the world will be crushed under the Muslamofascist tide if one more attack hits our teetering physical infrastructure and panic-stricken population, who would rather submit to Islam than face the horror of another 9/11, although on a vastly smaller scale and perpetrated by chumps with access to nothing better than tons of fertilizer proffered by Canadian law agents. Frankly, we are ready to abandon democracy, our necks aching for the yoke of…well whatever — Islam or a new Republican feudalism; it’s all good as long as nothing goes scary-boom.
Actually, here’s a note kept and saved from a time not long ago:
Pretty much the entire right-blogosphere, John. It’s like 10,000 people in a constant paroxysm of circular linking who all cover the same dozen weird stories every day.
From TigerHawk:
We have entered our 34th consecutive month of expansion in American manufacturing, the longest such increase in almost 17 years. There was no such winning streak even during the supposedly boom years of the Clinton administration. We know this boom is real, however, because it has been ages since there has been a rush of mainstream media stories about the collapse of American manufacturing.
Posted by John at 10:05 PM
You have to go through layers of links and hat-tips to find the actual cite, but it’s from a brief monthly survey by a nonprofit entity called the Institute for Supply Management.
This is indeed earthshaking news. The manufacturing segment now represents about 10% of the American economy, and according to the Institute’s own figures, it’s almost even keeping pace with the other, non-manufacturing 90%. So this is clearly one of those economic booms where people pay more for everything and generally do worse financially — as opposed to those vulgar loud ones with all the money cascading out of them, like during the Clinton Administration.
Also in the news, there is no inflation. …For people who don’t drive, buy food, see doctors, pay college tuition, plan retirements, or pay utility bills.
Marketwatch: High chance of John Hinderaker wearing a barrel on a Minneapolis street corner, selling pencils and cursing the liberal MSM.
The GOP continues to do for homosexuals what Strom Thurmond did for black people. I’m sure they’ll be just as thankful:
President Bush and congressional Republicans are aiming the political spotlight this week on efforts to ban gay marriage, with events at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — all for a constitutional amendment with scant chance of passage but wide appeal among social conservatives.
“Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society,” Bush said in his Saturday radio address. “Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.”
It’s apparently the government’s job to socially engineer its citizens into having (straight) nuclear families. Y’think Barry Goldwater’s rolling in his grave yet?
Just some highlights from our action-packed coming week, which we’ve been preparing for with busy fingers and many vacated Steel Reserve cans.
(Excelsior!)
In the meantime, ripping a link from TBogg to the marvelous Charles Pierce at the American Prospect:
I liked it so much better when conservatives weren’t trying to be cool. I liked their stern, iron-jawed parental disapproval of everything that happened since Calvin Coolidge blew town. I liked it when they thought it was all devil music sent by Khrushchev to take advantage of a young populace already weakened by fluoride in the water and Elvis on the electric television set. Becoming a young conservative meant you made a conscious choice to be the least cool person in your immediate social circle. You made a principled, rational decision to be a humorless little prig, and you were proud of it. People knew where they stood then. Now, though, we have boomer conservatives playing with popular culture and hurting themselves. Trust us, when you refer to some of the songs on your list as “little-known gems,â€? you’re already pretty much blown what little cred you may accidentally have picked up on your shoe.
Welp, here are some little-known gems.
The Rezillos – ‘Flying Saucer Attack’/’2000 AD’ (5:20)
The Mekons – ‘Ghosts of American Astronauts’ (3:52)
Joy Division – ‘The Charleston’ (0:57)
Also apropos the 50 Conservative Songs nonsense: Pete Townshend has been cruising around this segment of the left-blogoroni lately, so if someone turns up saying he’s Pete Townshend, don’t automatically be like, ‘Oh yeah, right.’ And also don’t be all pretending you’re Pete Townshend, eh?
Was the 2004 Election Stolen? No.
“There may have been widespread election fraud in 2004, but what really gets me steamed is the zany conspiracy theory that it might have affected the election.”
UPDATE: Shorter Farhad Manjoo…from the future!
“These so-called ‘irregularities’ in the 2006 election results are actually quite normal, as is shown by comparing them to Ohio in 2004.”
In the proud tradition of Michael Brown and George Deutsch, meet Tracy Henke:
The Homeland Security official who signed off on funding cuts for New York and extra cash for the heartland is a small-town gal whose back-door appointment to the job was mired in controversy.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Tracy Henke, 37, assistant secretary for grants and training, wasn’t quickly confirmed by the U.S. Senate after her nomination last year because of allegations she played politics in her previous post.
So an impatient White House appointed her while Congress was in recess, drawing howls of outrage from lawmakers and sparking questions about her qualifications.
Being qualified for your job is *so* pre-9/11. The only thing that matters post-DayThatChangedEverything is loyalty to the executive codpiece.
After six months on the job, Henke is already on President Bush’s radar screen – he thanked her by name yesterday for help on immigration reform, even as her anti-terrorism funding handiwork was being pilloried.
“Henke-y, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”
Good morning,
Call it bad luck, call it an attempt to start a conspiracy theory, call it whatever you want. The anti-spam comments plugin (Spam Karma 2) flagged a great many pro-Reason comments made on this post. The result was more comments accusing us and/or liberals of not being in favor of free speech and choking kittens. We’re always sorry when real people are caught in the spam nets — but going commando is simply not an option.
We’ve approved all comments that were (automatically) moderated, and greatly lowered some settings in order to make sure less (ideally no) legitimate spam omments get through. We’ve also increased the limit at which a captcha is offered so that real people can get through without our assistance.
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PS: Corrected the whole try v. not try again. Oops!