LT Saloon

Inspection- Questioning, Yet Hoping, for More “New” in the New Year: 09

Inspection- 00 to 08; a Preamble to New Year: 09

I’ll start with a quote by “Elvis” at Bartcop.com…

“(ask the MSM)…why Michael Connell’s death is not has suspicious as Vince Foster’s…”

New Years, 00. I was haunted by November and I have no idea if Michael Connell had something to do with it. But it doesn’t matter if he did or not. As far as being haunted…

We all know why.

New Years, 04. I was haunted by November, and Michael Connell may well have had something to do with it.

Why did I feel haunted?

My wife and I were at a Kerry election night “celebration,” Nashville, TN in November. Why both candidates create something resembling a high class frat party when one always turns into a funeral, I’ll never quite understand. They could at least have alternate plans to change it into a New Orleans type funeral. Now that would be going out with class.

About 8:30 Central, things had been going fairly well, and suddenly the numbers on the board started going screwy. I told my wife, “It’s like someone pulled a switch.” The local Kerry phone bank head had just met us in a hallway and acted rather nice, another “switch,” since she had stopped talking to me. A couple of months earlier I had mentioned I had a lot of information in E-mail accounts about vote rigging, and if she wanted, I could E-mail her a couple things I had just to see what she thought.

Her response?

Basically, “Shut the hell up, I don’t want to even know, now get back to your phone.” Then she stopped talking to me and acted haughty towards me until election night.

And we wonder why Dems kept losing?

Remember that time; about 8:30 Central: 9:30 Eastern.

Michael Connell’s recent plane crash has brought up an old wound. At 9:30, Eastern, 2004… Republicans funneled votes through a server in Tennessee, the lawsuit that Connell was supposed to testify in after being warned several times not to fly due to possible sabotage says. The claim: votes were switched; Kerry to Bush. Connell had agreed to testify concerning this. That was the approximate time I said, “It’s as if someone threw a switch…”

Spooky.

Inspection- Questioning, Yet Hoping, for More “New” in the New Year: 09

That’s right! Now ‘new and improved!’ Here it is, old man time, now reformulated: born again. Washes cleaner, brighter, younger, filled with more intelligence… though maybe not ‘whiter.’ You need it now. Right now!”

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The GOP plan to crash the economy

These people haven’t figured it out yet, but they lost the last two election cycles for a reason:  they are WRONG, and have been.

Monday, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell announced that he intends to block President Obama’s stimulus bill without ever seeing it.

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

He wants to bog this entire process down by sending everything through different committees, and spending months, if not years haggling back and forth on it.  He also wants to tie in tax breaks for the ultra-rich into any spending bill because Republicans are still convinced that the only way to stimulate the economy is from the top down.

The actual goal of the Republicans is to continue to try and box the Democrats in by threatening filibusters.  They are playing this huge game of chicken and their plan is to wait until the mid-term elections in hope that the electorate will feel the Democrats have failed.

I say, let’s just do away with the filibuster.  If the Democrats aren’t going to force the Republicans to actually camp out in the Senate and continually jabber on until they are exhausted, then maybe we don’t need it at all.  The spirit of the filibuster wasn’t to cave in at the mere threat of one, — the burden is on the person making the threat to carry through on that threat.  Harry Reid needs to either grow a HUGE set of balls right now or step aside and let someone else take over the Majority Leader position.

Going along to get along is only useful  if you are in the minority.  I kinda understand the reason for being timid during the 2007-2008 term because the majority margin was paper-thin.  But it is not so thin now.  We have an almost sixty percent majority in the Senate now.  If a party wants to “go along” then that should be the minority party.  Either get in involved or get out of the way.  But if they are going to do nothing but block important key legislation simply because they want to be spoilers, then lock them out altogether.  Take away the filibuster, or limit it to having only one active filibuster at a time.

As far as McConnell’s statement about whether taxpayers deserve to know about where the money for the stimulus bill is going to be spent, Hale “Bonddad” Stewart has the appropriate response to McConnell and other Republican Idiots who would stand in the way:

“Let me get this straight. A Senator who oversaw one of the largest expansions in government spending in history is now concerned about spending? According to the CBO, total government outlays under Bush and the Republican controlled Congress from 2001 -2006 increased from $1.8 trillion to $2.4 trillion — that’s an increase of 33%. At the same time — again under Republican rule from 2001 to 2006 — the total debt outstanding increased from $5,807,463,412,200.06 at the end of fiscal 2001 to $8,506,973,899,215.23. And now a man who helped to oversee this is complaining about spending? Excuse me?”

McConnell was also one of the strongest supporters of the Wall St. bailout and the biggest opponent of the Big 3 bailout, being the one who put the kibosh on the done deal that was hammered out by all the other parties involved. So the only question that remains really is, “Why does Mitch McConnell hate the working class?”

The Tattlesnake – Is Gov. Rod Getting Rammed? Edition

What’s the Republican Political Angle to the Blagojevich Prosecution?

Is Illinois’ F**king Golden Boy Merely the Stooge for a Partisan GOP Attack on Obama and the Dems?

Had Enough Leading Questions Already?

While some may choose others – such as Billo, Hannity, the Savage Wiener or Radio’s Anal Cyst Rush — as a reliable weathervane of what not to believe, I have my own preference – second-tier CNN newsreader Kyra Phillips. In the case of the first four names, we know they are regurgitating their daily Talking Points from the Ministry of DoublePlusGood Neocon Truth, but Kyra aspires to a level of journalistic integrity that renders her eructations of state-sanctioned Big Media hooey more entertaining – and she’s easier on the eyes and ears than the Cave Boys.

I first noticed Kyra’s particular talent in this regard back in May of 2003, following Junior’s Commander-Cody-with-a-Codpiece moment on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his hilariously boneheaded ‘Mission Accomplished’ ramblings afterward that ‘major combat operations’ had been completed in Iraq.

The Most Trusted Name in Newspeak had Kyra onboard the carrier that day and, with time to fill and a Glorious Victory in Eastasia to celebrate, she was given a free ride on a US Navy jet at the taxpayers’ expense. After landing, the breathless and excited Ms. Phillips gushed — only verbally, as far as I know — over the sea-going military, jet pilots, aircraft carriers and the whole goddamned Good War thingie – we had kicked Iraqi behind and all was right-wing with the world! But I noticed something in Kyra’s flushed smiling face and twittering-with-glee voice – why, it reminded me of a time decades before when I ran into a notorious groupie just hours after she had ‘balled’ (late ’60s slang term for copulation) every member of her favorite band! Of course, the video of Bush’s dumb publicity stunt is only useful now as a platform to launch a thousand jokes, and I’m sure Kyra’s embarrassing orgiastic spurt of militaristic slathering, wearing a flight helmet, no less, has been filed in the root cellar at CNN never to be seen again.

In the years since, whenever Kyra decides to editorialize the news, whether it be Rudy Giuliani’s popularity with Dixie-Fried Republicans, Fred Thompson’s manly irresistibility to voters, or Sarah Palin guaranteeing a big McCain win with the womenfolk, I have sure knowledge that whichever way Kyra blows, so to speak, the opposite is true.

This came up again a few weeks ago as the news of Scooter Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s December 9th arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich blanketed the airwaves like an all-day Chicago blizzard. There was Kyra, frowning eyebrows crawling toward one another, serious-minded caterpillars an omen of the bad news to come, hyperventilating that the Blago scandal was “ten times worse than Watergate,” an attitude likely shared by some of her second-string Big Media cable colleagues but not expressed in so grandiose and historic a phrase.

Really, Kyra, ‘ten times worse than Watergate’? Hint to Phillips’ fevered brainpan: Blago didn’t have a private ‘Plumbers’ force breaking into his political opponents’ offices, he didn’t suborn perjury, he didn’t claim executive privilege to protect himself, he didn’t have a slush fund with millions of dollars in it to pay off criminals in his employ, and any scandals he’s alleged to be involved in are fairly pedestrian examples of political corruption and not a Constitutional crisis for the nation.

Perhaps she was taking her cue from Fitzgerald, who buzzed that Blago was on a “crime spree.” Whoa! Al Capone went on ‘crime sprees’ such as the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre – Blago’s babbling about wringing cash out of various politicians and bigwigs comes nowhere near that level of violent wrongdoing.

Whatever Blago’s crimes, no one died, no one was injured, he didn’t start any unnecessary wars based on lies, he didn’t authorize torture or the waste of billions of dollars in taxpayer money through no-bid contracts, he didn’t order Ken Blackwell to finagle the Ohio vote in 2004 to shoehorn Junior back into the presidency, he didn’t conspire to steal an election and jail the winner, as in the Don Siegelman case in Alabama, all of which seem to me to be much more serious than these routine instances of alleged malfeasance by Blagojevich.

But there’s more to this story than has been unearthed by the corporate BM, using the telescope from the wrong end, as usual.

Here are a few facts that have been missed in the rush to convict Blago:

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Bailout?

Round here people think all the big bankers got arrested and thats why they needed to be bailed out….

However being the bastion of education and the only person in the area with an IQ that exceeds 17 I felt the need to explain it in detail…

1. If yer broke, no money, no food stamps or stuff to trade like moonshine, stolen chickens, naked pics of yer sister etc then meybe you can git a bailout.

2. But there are some requirements…like you need to have a business of some sort.  It don’t need to be profitable, (like cousin Jimmie Jacks Fishing Camp and All Night School Of Electrical Repair for instance) it actually needs to lose money.  It also helps to have some corrupt people in charge (kinda like the folks who run our county). You also have to have no respectable plans for the money and it’s okay if you squander it paying people for doing piss poor work.

3. You may also be asked to give up some frills (just fer appearance sake) like yer dirtbike and maybe your fancy 8mm movie camera that you shoot those porno’s you call family reunions on).  I also hear they will want you to take a pay cut but seems to me that cutting perfectly good paper money into pieces is kinda dumb.

4, If you go to Washington to plead yer case you have to be sure not to arrive in anything fancy (that means no hubcaps on yer pickup) and by cutting bonuses they mean that you can no longer tip Fannie down at the diner that dollar when she brings you yer grits and eggs.

5. You will also need a bank account, and in view of yor new found wealth I suggest throwing away the old dependable shoe box and buying one of them plaster pigs with the slot on top.

I hope this helps and remember to waste whatever you get wisely!! Btw Merry Christmas everybody!

The Tattlesnake — Another Holiday Rerun Edition

Yet another holiday rerun. Merry Christmas!

THE GUY IN THE JESUS SUIT

The guy in the Jesus suit
occupied space at the end of the bar
exuding waves of beneficence
and winey fumes
to all and sundry.

The suit fit comfortably,
38 Regular, relaxed-fit pleat pants,
with a seven-and-a-quarter halo
on the side.
He muttered of Old Testament doom
and it wasn’t even Sunday.

“I’m only here to fulfill prophecy,”
he remarked to the bartender,
who was taking his money from the bar.
On the jukebox Bing began to croon
‘White Christmas’ and Jesus started to say,

“I’m very disappointed in you all,”
he turned to me and glared,
“As usual, you people just got it all wrong:
I was actually born in June,
and died at the end of May.”

“I was a Jew preaching to Jews,
and so were all twelve original Apostles,
and then along comes Paul,
who was something of a loon,
and gives to the Gentiles a way

“to get into heaven.
Hey, the only person I said was saved
was a thief hanging next to me,
sometime before noon,
on my crucifixion day.

“And you can’t even follow
the few simple words,
that I spoke in the Sermon on the Mount,
instead you fight about theological trivia
and spread horrifying gloom
and tell people there’ll be hell to pay,

Read on -- There is more »« Okay, fold it up now

Inspection- Who Was This Jesus Fellow, Anyway?

This is the second in the series of Inspection columns inspired by Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianites. His body: a metaphor for how little others have understood who he really was before and after, crucifixion.

As the body twitched and quivered into the arms of Death; animals approached. They ripped out legs, broke off arms. Scratching out eyes with claws, others attempted to shred and plunge their way into his body so they might eat his heart. Yet for each body part taken another grew. Despite this amazing regenerative ability, the body was still a body; risen or not… nothing more: a mere vehicle for the man, the prophet, the “Savior.” To this day they still fight over his carcass, regardless of the obvious, “He is not here.”

As the years passed some animals were killed off by others, but there were always thrice fold to replace them. If their goal was to become the sole source for divining his message: they failed, for others will always understand his message in their own way.

Who was this fellow, Jesus?

What best represents who he was?

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The First National Bank of Liberaltopia

I remember what it was like to apply for a car loan, a mortgage, a credit card.  Someone was doing a background check on you and there were a lot of hoops that you had to jump through.

But hey, if I were a financial institution, and I was in serious financial trouble and needed a cash infusion of several billion bucks, all I need to do is fill out a two page application, sign it (or designate someone to sign it for you) and send it in.  Then it is just a matter of deciding whether to have the money delivered to you or go pick it up in person.

The TARP Application can be downloaded in PDF format and asks such tough and hard-hitting questions as:

PAGE 1

Institution Name:

Address of Institution:

Primary Contact Name:

Primary Contact Phone Number:

Primary Contact Fax Number:

Primary Contact Email Address:

Secondary Contact Name:

Secondary Contact Phone Number:

Secondary Contact Fax Number:

Secondary Contact Email Address:

PAGE 2

RSSD, Holding Company Docket
Number and / or FDIC Certificate
Number, As Relevant:

Amount of Preferred Shares
Requested:

Amount Of Institution’s Authorized
But Unissued Preferred Stock
Available For Purchase:

Amount Of Institution’s Authorized
But Unissued Common Stock:

Amount Of Total Risk-Weighted
Assets As Reported On The
Holding Company’s Or Applicable
Institution’s Most Recent FR-Y9,
Call Report, Or TFR, As Relevant:

Institution Has Reviewed The
Investment Agreements And
Related Documentation On
Treasury’s Website (Yes/No):

Describe Any Condition, Including
A Representation Or Warranty,
Contained In The Investment
Agreements And Related
Documentation, The Institution
Believes it Cannot ComplyWith By
November 14, 2008 And Provide A
Timeline For Reaching
Compliance1:

Type of Company2:

Signature of Chief Executive
Officer (or Authorized Designee):

Date of Signature:

1 May be provided as an attachment, no longer than 1 page
2 Publicly Traded Stock Company; Stock Company Without Publicly Traded Shares; Other (please specify)

So, I have decided to open up a bank.  My bank is already in financial trouble — it is virtually broke, and while I would LOVE to free up some money to lend to people,  I just don’t have the money to lend.   I figure about $5 billion should be a good start to make that happen.  Besides, it is Christmas time, and I think I deserve a raise and a fat bonus too.  I’ve work real hard on this and I think I deserve it.

Besides, it is none of your business if I am paying out bonuses.  I mean, we are only requesting free taxpayer money — it is not as if you own us or anything.

Jackboot over at the Rott posted an even shorter form.  (of course he blames it on the Dems, because you could NEVER blame the “free and unfettered and unregulated market forces”, ya know…

More on the Death of Rove’s IT Man Michael Connell, Who Allegedly Helped Rig Elections for Bush and the GOP

Just to expand on Ken Carmen’s “A Very Convenient Crash” post that dealt with the mysterious death last Friday of Karl Rove’s electoral IT man Michael Connell, here’s part of an interview Amy Goodman conducted with Mark Crispin Miller, who has been following this case, and Bush/GOP election fraud in general, closely.

Here are some fascinating excerpts, but read the whole transcript here.

Rove’s IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on December 22, 2008

Amy Goodman: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.

Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s e-mail files and how they went missing.

Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed this weekend that Connell had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.”

Well, Mark Crispin Miller joins us now, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. Mark Crispin Miller us now in our firehouse studio.

[...]

AG: Alright, well, we had you on right before the election, because that’s when Mike Connell was being deposed. This news that came out of his death in a plane crash on Friday night, talk about what you understand has happened.

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we’re obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone’s plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We’re told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at — and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.

AG: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?

MCM: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, and Arnebeck — also, Velvet Revolution heard from tipsters, as well, tipsters who also claimed that Connell’s life was at risk. Stephen Spoonamore, the whistleblower who was the first — who was the one to name Connell in the first place, also had an ear to the inside. He’s also very connected. And all these people were saying Rove is making threats, the White House is very worried about this case.

Having heard all this, Arnebeck contacted Mukasey, he contacted Nancy Rogers, who is the Ohio Attorney General, and he wrote a letter to the court, telling all of them that “This man should be in protective custody. He is an important witness in a RICO case. Please do something to look after him.” And they didn’t respond to this.

AG: So, explain what this case is all about and exactly what Mike Connell has been doing over these last years. What does it mean to be Karl Rove’s IT guru?

MCM: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubious election of the last eight years. We’re talking about Florida in 2000. We’re talking about Ohio in 2004. We’re talking about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman’s re-election for governor. There’s some evidence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-Max Cleland Senate race in Georgia in 2002. To be Karl Rove’s IT guru seems to have meant basically setting it up so that votes could be electronically shaved to the disadvantage of the Democrats and the advantage of Republicans.

Obama May Have Won By a Much Larger Margin

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Another MasterCard Commercial

Achieving Peace & Calm During the Holidays

Received in an email, author unknown, but good advice for us all.

Achieving Peace & Calm During the Holidays

I am passing this on to you because it definitely worked for me, and we all could probably use more calm in our lives, especially at this hectic time of the year.

Some doctor on television this morning said the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started. So I looked around my house to see the things I’d started and hadn’t finished and, before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of shhhardonay, a bodle of Baileys, a half a sicks pak of bear, a butle of vocka, a pockage of Prunglies, tha mainder of bot Valum scriptins, the res the Chesescke an a box chocolets.

Yu haf no idr who frkin gud I fel.

Peas sen dis orn to dem yu fee ar in ned ov inr pece an culm

happpee halidozees