The Rake Magazine

This is a mule

This is an ass. Know the difference.

Not that Pawlenty's screed against illegal immigrants left much doubt about the Republican position on what to do with them, but in case there was any lingering uncertainty, State House Speaker Steve (The Hammer) Swiggum weighed in today on the matter in an op-ed piece in the Strib.

Swiggum takes Strib columnist Nick Coleman and Attorney General Mike Hatch to task for calling the Mexican swine who are shitting all over our country "undocumented aliens" instead of "illegal sons of bitches." He bolsters his point admirably with the following syllogism: "Calling illegal immigrants "undocumented" is like calling a burglar an uninvited houseguest."

Think about that. Those wetbacks are here to steal from us. THEY ARE BURGLARS, dammit. That's a profession they must be pursuing while taking a break from washing our dishes, cleaning our houses, working in our slaughterhouses, and picking our vegetables.

On top of being theives, they are drug dealers, too, according to Steve (The Righteous) Swiggum. Need evidence? Here you go, from Steve (The Just) Swiggum's own typewriter: "For example, after successfully curbing the production of methamphetamine in Minnesota this year, we're now battling the importation of meth from Mexico. Fifteen people were arrested recently in central Minnesota in one of the largest meth investigations in the state. Law enforcement described the suspects as a mix of legal and illegal immigrants."

First, it's preposterous to say we've "successfully" curbed the production of meth in Minnesota. That will happen about the same time we "successfully" curb the production of bullshit in the Legislature.

Second, people who bring drugs into the U.S. are not immigrants, they are "mules." And we'll get rid of mules about the same time we get rid of fear-mongering asses like Swiggum and Pawlenty--the sooner the better in my opinion.

Katherine Kersten is a carbuncle on the ass of the Star Tribune.

I said a few weeks back I was going to swear off Katherine, because she's such an easy target, but damnit, yesterday she just made me mad all over again.

The story was one of her usual: the good soldier, or the good religious person, or the good whatever. Today was about a medic from Rochester who went beyond the call of duty to teach Afghan medical personnel some advanced therapy techniques.

It was going fine (except for the inevitable smarminess) until she got to the last graph. Here it is: "We've grown used to news media reports that portray U.S. troops as a malign influence. In recent months, the words prisoner and torture have frequently appeared in the same sentence. Is Buhain the odd man out in an army that is otherwise an oppressive occupying force? Or does our military have countless soldiers like him?"

I forgot. It's the media's fault that reports of torture have leaked out of the war zone. It's not the fault of the torturers. IT'S THE GODDAMN MEDIA!

Right you are, Katherine. If it weren't for the media, we wouldn't know about there being no WMD. We wouldn't know about "rendition." Hell, we wouldn't even know there were American casualties or burned up Afghani and Iraqi babies. And, of course we wouldn't know that the NSA has been listening in on our phone conversations.

And, we wouldn't know that all of our loved ones who are in the military have somehow changed into monsters and forsaken all their moral values and become vicious torturing thugs.

Thanks Katherine for setting us all straight again. How would we ever know what's important without you?

This was the hand I used to hand over the payments to the "scholars"

A month or so ago, I took the Strib to task for their uncritical printing of a letter which opined that conservative think tanks were staffed by those whose conservative views prevented their hiring by legitimate universities.

More on that topic today from Paul Krugman in the NY Times (subscription required.) As Krugman notes, Republican lobbyist extraordinare Jack Abramoff's involvement in using the ostensibly scholarly works of these think tanks for conservative political purposes was reported before in The New Republic (subscription required.) Now it seems Abramoff was directly involoved in handling payments to think tank "fellows" at the Cato Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation. Thank that bastion of liberalism, Business Week, for bringing that to our attention.

Anyway, as Krugman points out, Abramoff paying for "scholarship" on behalf of his clients doesn't deviate much from the Republican norm of planting softball questions at news conferences or paying directly for op-ed pieces on behalf of Administration programs.

So, when they say, "You can't believe everything you read," that's certainly the truth these days. You can believe that much.

Another big hand for MN Publius for outing Pat Shortridge, Mark Kennedy's campaign manager. No, he's not gay...he'd cost too many Christian votes. He was a lobbyist for Enron and a participant in the secret energy policy talks with Cheney that made sure the world was kept safe for big oil.

This is the second big story that the two college guys who are MN Publius have dug up. (Here's the first.)

What's Kennedy's response to this? Amy Klobuchar's guy once worked for (gasp) Howard Dean.

Are Minnesota Republicans so stupid that they are going to actually nominate this guy, instead of say, this guy, who although he's made a lot of votes we don't necessarily agree with, has some integrity and doesn't mind siding with Democrats if he thinks it's the right thing to do?

Hey Republicans, think about it. Do the right thing now and dump Kennedy before it's too late. This ain't Texas, you know.

Technorati Tags: Enron, Mark Kennedy

We'll teach those Japanese not to attack us. Let's invade Kamchatka.

Bob Herbert in the NY Times weighs in today with a good idea, one that I advocated obliquely just yesterday: that we reinstitute the draft.

After all, if this war is really in the national interest, we should all have to fight it, no? I can hardly wait to see the sons and daughters of Bush, Cheney (oops, she can't go because she's a lesbian) and members of Congress in uniform. Bet we'd have the appropriations for body armor and armored Humvees then, don't you think?

Contributing to my general malaise yesterday was making the mistake of not changing the radio channel immediately when I heard Bush talking about winning in Iraq. What really gassed me was when he declared that more Americans were killed on 9/11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and this was somehow justification for the Iraq war.

Here's some news for you, George. On December 8, 1941 FDR did not start blaming any country other than Japan...(ok, maybe Germany.) And both of them really did have weapons of mass destruction.

One other observation: Japan surrendered 1365 days after Pearl Harbor. Tojo was under arrest (and would later be executed) and Hitler had been dead for four months. It has, as of yesterday, been 1548 days since 9/11/2001, and the guy behind the attack is still running around loose blowing up London, Madrid, Bali, etc.

Technorati Tags: War, Iraq