This line of thinking… the Skull and Bones Defense, if you will… It is festering. (Apparently, this quote is echoed from Wonkette…

……..
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?
………

The number: 25… We’ll see…

Courtesy Billmon, I’ve got this statement, from Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem:

The irony that these abuses were taking place in Abu Ghraib, the most notorious prison during Saddam’s regime, a facility that should have been razed to the ground and in its place built a shrine or memorial to its many victims. These abuses were taking place in that most notorious jail.

The Liberation Express Bogs Down. It has ran out of gas.

Update: We know how Bush translates into English. How does he translate into Arabic?

Nothing… good… can… come… from… this.

You never want to be coddled,
You never want to be kissed,
You’re just an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST!
When I come close when we’re dancing,
I get a slap on the wrist,
Don’t be an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST!
You’ve got no use for moonlight,
You’d turn your back on a star!
Your heart is bent and you’re against The state of things as they are!
When you’re a hundred years older,
maybe you’ll want what you’ve missed,
Don’t be an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST!

Thank you, Duke Ellington.
Rearrange the word, though, and you get:
“antidisestablishmentterrorist.”

… A sign of the coming artistic clap-down if there ever was one.
Fahrenheit 451 Revisisted, indeedy!

I told them that I cast my ballot. And I told them that I cast my ballot for… Kucinich. “I knew it”, he uttered under his breath…

… and then he directed me to the back page of the latest issue of their newspaper…

“Unbeknownst to the Synarchists, Dem Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon”…

Stop right there. What is a “pre-candidate”?

Skip forward… “To dispense with Dennis Kucinich, who has popped in and out of Oregon a few times, recognize what his campaign lunge is […] the “Kooch” is helping the DNC block LaRouche delegates by telling the Oregonians to use their “irrelevant” votes as a protest, and vote Kooch. […] Along with several interventions on the “Kooch of peace” himself, the LYM has been …”

Stop right there. “interventions on the Kooch of peace himself” (or, as I would phrase it “hisownself”.) This, I assume refers to the act of accosting a candidate… “getting in their face”, so to speak.

“We are experimenting with literally taking over the campuses. Last week, we combined early morning saturation-leafletting of the classrooms of several major Portland-area campuses with intense Socratic dialouges”

Stop right there. That’s what they call it. How intellectually upscale!

“Virtually nobody is ignorant of the existence of Lyndon LaRouche, and several are comintg to Seattle’s impending cadre school.”

(Reminiscent of comments made by a Daniel Lee, but never mind…) Stop right there. “Cadre School”. Try this… google the terms “LaRouche” and “cadre school” and you’ll get a photograph of them cadre schools. Scan the faces, and describe the emotional tinge you get in the gut…

Read also A Piece of Blue Sky for a similar effect. (But then read Alan Mendelsohn.)

“Our lunge was that we need, not only delegates, but 10,000 classically trained, young jungle fighters at the DNC Convention in July, so we can take over the party.”

Neat-o.

Okay. There’s more, but it’s more of the same.

Now I’m done with them.

I think.

Taken from David Brock’s new site:

ROBINSON: Well, one thing that needs to be understood, is that there’s also an impact on the torturer. … Now, I use the word torture, but that’s not what’s happening in these pictures.

ROBINSON: I’ve seen — I’ve seen worse than this at — frat hazing is worse than this.

Saddam’s Rape Rooms… the post-Saddam Rape Rooms…

Forget the debate as to which rape room is better or is worse…

You see… the abuse that Bush and Kerry had in their initiation rites back in Yale was even worse!!

Which, I suppose, once again brings us back to the thesis of what’s wrong with the world…

There’s something wrong with the world today
I don’t know what it is
Something’s wrong with our eyes

Livin’ on the edge
You can’t help yourself from fallin’
You can’t help yourself at all
Livin’ on the edge
You can’t stop yourself from fallin’
Livin’ on the edge
You can’t help yourself
You can’t help yourself
Livin’ on the edge
You can’t help yourself at all
You can’t help yourself
Livin’ on the edge
You can’t stop yourself from fallin’
Livin’ on the edge

Vice President Cheney endorsed the Fox News Channel during a conference call last night with tens of thousands of Republicans who were gathered across the country to celebrate a National Party for the President Day organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

“It’s easy to complain about the press — I’ve been doing it for a good part of my career,” Cheney said. “It’s part of what goes with a free society. What I do is try to focus upon those elements of the press that I think do an effective job and try to be accurate in their portrayal of events. For example, I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they’re more accurate in my experience, in those events that I’m personally involved in*, than many of the other outlets.”

[…]

Cheers could be heard erupting behind an insurance representative from Johnson County, Iowa, as she began asking Cheney her question. She complained about “the inconsistencies that we see in the media” and asked him to “clarify some of the things that are happening in Iraq that really are good but just never get through the media.”

Cheney told the questioner he has “experienced the same kind of frustration you have.”

“The fact is that we spend a lot of time talking to a broad range of people out there to make sure we’ve got a good fix on what’s going on,” Cheney said. “You can’t simply rely just upon the press coverage. The situation today is clearly — we’ve made enormous progress when you think about where we came from a little over a year ago. Saddam Hussein was in power. Tonight, he’s in jail. His sons are dead. The government is gone. It’s been taken down. The extent to which you had a regime there that hosted terrorists over the years and also pursued and used weapons of mass destruction — that’s all been dramatically changed.”

………………

Saddam Hussein was a big fan of Iraqi Satellite Television…

(*) they report the news we give them… just the way we give it to them…

I eventually creeped out the LaRouchites a bit…

… as is my want.

Anyway, following an unrelated conversation in the vicintity, where I tried to ascertain whether or not I could get a quick job and some quick money — aside from the rich rewards offered by — nay, I won’t say it — (or if said job has the tattered ear-marks of an Amway / Cutco Pyramidial Scheme), interjected momentarily to get the gist of the Painting offer.

Anyway, eventually I ask the LaRouchite when he discovered LaRouche. I’m annoyingly sympathetic toward these types of things…

… His story doesn’t fully mesh… he became aware that the country was heading into the wrong direction, could see the beginnings of perpetual warfare back in ’99, saw the coming Economic Depression…

… and discovered that Lyndon LaRouche had all of the answers.

Common concerns. Heightened to paranoia. Young, uncertain mind grasps for answers. Dreads the future. Grabs onto whatever they can find.

What’s upcoming? Well… in a few weeks, there will be a major Democratic event here in Oregon… which the LaRouchites will try to infiltrate.

I guess they know their places.

Though, sometimes they don’t know their places… they maintain, after 7 elections, that there is a major rift in the Democratic Party, and the bigwigs of the Democratic Party are seriously fretting over the LaRouche Factor.

Probably, LaRouche Incorporated will incorporate the latest in-the-millworks faint “Dump Kerry” noise into their own noise… (Ain’t a’happening…) … as part of their “Call to Arms”.

They sing Signor Abbate, evidentally.

I wonder, though: does this guy ever get a C-SPAN appearance?

THIS is good.

JIM ANGLE: One person tells us that 99 percent of the questions went to President Bush himself, with just a few going to Vice-President Cheney…

That means… Cheney answered 1 percent (or 15 to 20 percent, if you go by non-Fox News reporting) of the questions?

Or rather… almost roughly none of the questions.