News of the Restless

Festive Left Friday Blogging: Happy Birthday, Fidel!

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Sabina Becker

The venerable old barbudo turns 84 today, and is still going strong. And no wonder: with this much love from his people, how could he not? He’s gonna live to be 100, outlasting all his enemies, and when he dies, he’ll be thumbing his nose in the general direction of Miami.

Feliz cumpleaños, Fidel.

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How far would Washington go to defend torture and death squads?

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Sabina Becker

Sometimes, it’s just instructive to take a good hard look at the past in order to really grasp what’s going on in the present. Take, for example, the fact that Washington has officially sanctioned torture and the use of death squads during the nearly ten years that the War on Terra has been raging. Dubya even went so far as to get some legal beagles to write him some excuse notes, sparking worldwide outrage. Think it’s anything new? Think again. Here’s the latest declassified bombshell from the National Security Archive, which landed in my inbox yesterday:

Washington, DC, August 11, 2010 – Documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 40th anniversary of the death of U.S. advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay show the Nixon administration recommended a “threat to kill [detained insurgent] Sendic and other key [leftist insurgent] MLN prisoners if Mitrione is killed.” The secret cable from U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, made public here for the first time, instructed U.S. Ambassador Charles Adair: “If this has not been considered, you should raise it with the Government of Uruguay at once.”
The message to the Uruguayan government, received by the U.S. Embassy at 11:30 am on August 9, 1970, was an attempt to deter Tupamaro insurgents from killing Mitrione at noon on that day. A few minutes later, Ambassador Adair reported back, in another newly-released cable, that “a threat was made to these prisoners that members of the ‘Escuadrón de la Muerte’ [death squad] would take action against the prisoners’ relatives if Mitrione were killed.”
Dan Mitrione, Director of the U.S. AID Office of Public Safety (OPS) in Uruguay and the main American advisor to the Uruguayan police at the time, had been held for ten days by MLN-Tupamaro insurgents demanding the release of some 150 guerrilla prisoners held by the Uruguayan government. Mitrione was found dead the morning of August 10, 1970, killed by the Tupamaros after their demands were not met.
“The documents reveal the U.S. went to the edge of ethics in an effort to save Mitrione–an aspect of the case that remained hidden in secret documents for years,” said Carlos Osorio, who directs the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone project. “There should be a full declassification to set the record straight on U.S. policy toward Uruguay in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”
“In the aftermath of Dan Mitrione’s death, the Uruguayan government unleashed the illegal death squads to hunt and kill insurgents,” said Clara Aldrighi, professor of history at Uruguay’s Universidad de la República, and author of “El Caso Mitrione” (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2007). “The U.S. documents are irrefutable proof that the death squads were a policy of the Uruguayan government, and will serve as key evidence in the death squads cases open now in Uruguay’s courts,” Osorio added. “It is a shame that the U.S. documents are writing Uruguayan history. There should be declassification in Uruguay as well,” stated Aldrighi, who collaborated in the production of this briefing book.

Who was Dan Mitrione? Oh, just the US’s leading torturer in South America at the time. His specialty was the “scientific” use of electroshock as torture, ostensibly for purposes of interrogation. He not only tortured countless innocent people himself (some of them to the point of death), he trained the local police in three countries to do the same. Uruguay was the last; before that it was the Dominican Republic and Brazil. He was portrayed, in a thinly fictionalized form, by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras’s movie, State of Siege. You can read more about him here and here.

What’s notable about all this is how long ago it happened. Mitrione met harsh justice in Uruguay 40 years ago, and yet it seems like it was only yesterday. We can clearly see a pattern, a striking similarity between how Tricky Dick did things, and how his ideological scion, Dubya, did them. The use of death threats, death squads (organized by the US’s puppet regimes abroad) and torture–can you honestly tell the difference between Uruguay in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Central America in the Reaganite ’80s, and Afghanistan and Iraq over the last ten years? I have difficulty with it, myself.

And no wonder. When it comes to imperialism, not much has changed from one decade to the next, other than the location of the worst manifestations of the disease. For the last 200 years, ever since the cry went up in South America for freedom from the Spanish empire, Latin America has felt that big stick of gringo imperialism coming to supplant the royal sceptre of Spain–here, there, everywhere. Not one country south of the Rio Grande has been immune. Nor, since the discovery of petroleum under its sands, has the Middle East, although it is a more recent target. The brutality has gone through minor variations, but the overall theme is readily recognizable: Whatever Washington wants, Washington gets, and damn the expense–even if the toll is a river of human blood.

And if a more “modern” form of the Spanish Inquisition is required to exact it, so be it. A Dan Mitrione is worth a death squad and the murders of hundreds of local freedom fighters–so runs the reasoning. They will go all the way–literally to the death–to defend their imperial methods.

I wonder what Mitrione-like characters have yet to shake out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I predict we’ll be seeing several, probably in the guise of “civilian contractors” to give plausible deniability to the military and the CIA. Mitrione was, after all, one who operated under the guise of a police chief, not an intelligence officer, although he was attached to the FBI in 1959, and the State Department as of 1960. He was sent on his first foreign assignment that same year. His plausible deniability: he was training local police in Latin America. In what? Well, what else: interrogation. “The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect”–that was his motto. Death of the victim was undesirable only because it meant that the torturer had been inept in getting what he wanted out of the poor soul.

Nowadays, it’s waterboarding, not electroshock, that’s in vogue. But the purpose is the same, both superficially and underneath it all. Nothing has changed much in 40 years, or indeed 200.

It’s yesterday once more. Shooby doo lang lang…

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Posted in Barreling Right Along, Fascism Without Swastikas, Isn't That Illegal?, Law-Law Land, Not So Compassionate Conservatism, Paraguay, Uruguay, Sick Frickin' Bastards, The War on Terra, W is for Weak (and Stupid) | 2 Comments

A body blow for the Colombia-US military accord

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Sabina Becker

Meet the most odious piece of sneaky-cowardly political interference in the Americas since, well, since the US backed a bunch of putschists trying to overthrow Chavecito:

It’s not dead yet, but damned if there isn’t blood in the water now:

La W Radio reports that the Constitutional Court of Colombia ~~has declared~~ will declare* the military-cooperation accord between Colombia and the US inexecutable, since it must first be passed by the Congress before being approved.
The court declared the measure inconstitutional, but left it alive for a limited time. It gave the Colombian congress one year to decide whether or not to approve the accord.
[…]
The military accord produced a crisis between Colombia and Venezuela, after which [Venezuelan president] Hugo Chávez accused the US government of using Colombian territory to attack his country.

Translation mine.

And the crisis unleashed by this odious accord isn’t limited to Venezuela or its uppity, mouthy president. Many Colombians don’t like it either:

These people and thousands of others like them have been protesting this accord since it was first announced. Let’s hope the Colombian congress hears them and nullifies this bastard agreement, or there will be no peace within Colombian borders, much less between Colombia and its neighbors.

PS: Otto has more, plus some winning snarkage. Go read.

*Translation error fixed, thanx Otto…

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Posted in Angry Pacifist Speaks Her Mind, El NarcoPresidente, Fascism Without Swastikas, Huguito Chavecito, Isn't That Illegal?, Law-Law Land | 1 Comment

A video you simply MUST see

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Sabina Becker

It has everything: The Internet! Keyboard Cat! The Gaza Freedom Flotilla! Hasbara galore! Terrorists of every possible (fake) kind! And oh yeah, stick around till the end, and you even get a little RickRolling. How can you possibly resist?

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Posted in Gazing on Gaza, The WTF? Files | Comments Off

Christopher Hitchens is dying. Big fuckin’ whoop!

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Sabina Becker

I guess, given this news…

Hitchens spoke in very stark terms about his mortality.
“I’m a realist, I’m objective,” he said. “It’s not a good cancer to get. The statistics are very depressing. Mine isn’t just in my esophagus, either. It’s gone to my lymph nodes. I would be a very lucky person to live another five years.”
Goldberg and Hitchens then welcomed Hitchens’ “dearest friend,” author Martin Amis, as the conversation turned toward religion.
Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, said he will never become religious despite his looming mortality. If any such conversion is ever attributed to him, he said, it would be either a lie propagated by the religious community or an effect of the cancer and treatment that made him no longer himself.
“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain. I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark,” he said.

…I should regret having written this a few days ago, but I don’t.

The awful fact is that Hitchens’s brain is already disintegrating; his own writings betray the fact. And it’s been doing so for years. He moved from left to right over time; that’s a sure sign of degeneration unto itself. But the manifestation of that cancerous phenomenon was particularly grotesque in him. When he devoted so much energy in the latter 1990s to excoriating Bill Clinton on moralistic terms for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and aided the far right from the so-called left, I quickly came to despise him for what he’d done. Hitchens was not the only one who set back progress immeasurably during the Clinton era, but he was a so-called respected voice. I don’t know why he wasn’t blackballed on the spot by the so-called liberal media, unless they were not really liberal after all. (BINGO!)

And I couldn’t believe anyone could consider him anything less than fascist when he supported Dubya’s wars. Most hilarious was his insistence that they were “secularist”. No, they were capitalist, with a hefty dose of religious fundamentalism thrown in. If Hitch were really serious about secularism, he’d have decried them. Instead, he chose to studiously ignore Dubya’s very pointed use of the word “crusade”–a specifically religious term–in his war against Islam. I guess some religious conservatisms are more kosher than others, if you are a brown-nosing irrationalist like Hitch.

Drunken rampages like this one don’t help him, either. Nor do drunken brawls like this one. They just make him look like a fucking palooka with piss-poor judgment.

And really, it doesn’t matter if he believes in God or not; karma hits you no matter what you believe, and karma is getting back at him now. You don’t need to be religious to feel remorse at life’s end for what you did wrong; you just need to be halfway human.

If Hitch cares to reflect further on the subject of mortality (and that of morality), I offer him the words of Rudyard Kipling to ponder:

I could not dig, I dared not rob,
And so I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
–“A Dead Statesman”, 1924

That’s what karma looks like, people.

Hitch lied to please the mob when it howled for Bill Clinton’s blood, and for that of the innocent people of Iraq. He has never expressed an instant’s regret for that lethal, life-destroying foolishness. In his own mind, he was justified in doing so. Even now, as his life comes to a close, he’s not making amends for his lies, he’s making bids to aggrandize himself even further. He is a sociopath.

And the only thing that saddens me about his passing is that it took so damn long. He wore out his welcome on this planet when he joined a band of amoral thugs in taking down a merely mortal man on the grounds of so-called morality. He should not have lived to fart out the bullshit he did about Dubya and his immoral wars.

Happy dying, Hitch, you sick, seedy, disreputable fucking bastard.

Comments now closed. Tough luck.

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Posted in BushCo Death Watch, Crapagandarati | 13 Comments

Chavecito is in Colombia today…

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Sabina Becker

…at the behest of his newly inaugurated local counterpart, Juan Manuel Santos. Will there be crow on the supper menu tonight at El Palacio Narquiño? Well, let’s let the photo of the day (tweeted by Andrés Izarra of Telesur) do the talking:

Chavecito wore his flag jacket, not a formal suit. Patriotic, rather than toadying/diplomatic, in other words. He gave a short speech at the airport, basically thanking Santos for the welcome and his willingness to talk peace (which Chavecito has always been for, anyway–never having declared war on Colombia, but rather closing the borders when it became obvious that the previous Narcopresidente of that land was getting belligerent with HIM.)

I don’t know what the outcome will be yet, but something tells me the ‘Cito will emerge on top.

EDIT: Another tweeted photo from Andrés Izarra…

Chavecito greets a crowd of Colombian well-wishers en route to the meeting place at San Pedro Alejandrino. D’you think they like him, maybe?

EDIT #2: Yup, they like him…they REALLY like him. Chavecito has stopped his caravan twice now to greet his Colombian fans, including this little one:

According to Andrés Izarra (whom you really should follow!), the crowd was yelling “Long Live Chávez!”

According to Venezuelan newspaper Panorama, this took place in the barrio of La Lucha, (appropriately, “The Struggle”), Santa Marta.

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Posted in El NarcoPresidente, El Predicto Speaks..., Huguito Chavecito | 2 Comments

Quotable: Iain McGilchrist on poetry

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Sabina Becker

“Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex as language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning. Sometimes this is most obvious in a foreign language, because there the smooth, familiar words recede, and the sheer awesomeness of what is meant comes refreshed by the new encounter. As a child I was bewitched by the poems of Heine that my father would recite to me while shaving. Im Abendsonnenschein . . . I remember thinking then that the real word for sunshine was Sonnenschein. So, too, something seemed missing when things disappeared: they only truly disappeared when they were verschwunden. This is odd because my father was a Scot and my mother English. It seems like a sort of latent knowledge.”

–Iain McGilchrist, “Four Walls”, in Poetry Magazine

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Posted in Artsy-Fartsy Culture Stuff, Quotable Notables, She Blinded Me With Science | Comments Off

Music for a Sunday: Two from Dame pa’ Matala

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Sabina Becker

Two more consciousness-elevating songs from Venezuela’s finest folkies:

First, “Roba Caminos”:

Best line: “Shuddup muddafucka!”

Sounds like he’s tired of something. Hmmm, I wonder what?

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Posted in Artsy-Fartsy Culture Stuff, Huguito Chavecito, Music for a Sunday | Comments Off

Wankers of the Week: Oppressed overclass edition

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Sabina Becker

Cartoon excerpt by Ruben Bolling; see the rest of it here.

Oh, those poor privileged people, nothing’s going their way this week. The Cordoba Islamic community centre was okayed for construction by New York City Hall, AND PropH8 was overturned in California, and Elena Kagan has been confirmed in spite of all right-wing slurs and sliming–meaning that their panic buttons aren’t going to get any rest. Neither are certain parts of their anatomy; the more the privileged feel righteously oppressed by the uppity underdogs, the more compulsively they masturbate to alleviate the panic. And the more I feel compelled to mock them for it. So, bearing that in mind, here are this week’s winning, wanking, overwhelmingly white overclass winners, pronounced wieners (or, alternatively, whiners):

1. Conrad Fucking Black. Yeah, tell us something we didn’t know about the US penal system–we already know it’s racist, it targets predominantly the poor and jobless, yadda yadda yadda. WE KNOW ALL THAT. What I wanna know is, have YOU learned anything? Or are you still the same greedy, verbose, self-important fuck you always were? Oh wait, lemme guess…

Barbara was in Toronto and it was our 18th wedding anniversary. She couldn’t make her reservation on Air Canada because she could see on television the driver she had arranged to pick me up marooned outside the gates of the prison complex. He had no authorization to prove he was ordered for me and not simply a ruse of the press. Faxes flew back and forth delaying her departure.
Finally, the only way to get to Palm Beach that night, just before midnight, which she was able to do, was to charter from a well-wisher at a knock-down rate, (basically the cost of aviation fuel), a very tired and sluggish medevac plane without a washroom.

Oh noes, it’s not a LearJet! They probably didn’t serve champagne, either. Horrors! How did poor Babs survive the ordeal?

I was delighted to be back in my home, which the prosecutors had tried to seize for years. For the first time since I was last there, I enjoyed pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men. I had a glass of wine, and waited for Barbara, to celebrate the happiest of all wedding anniversaries.

Nope. You haven’t really learned anything. No contrition, no admission, just “poor me, victimized by the system”, with never a thought to all the people Hollinger Inc. has done out of a decent living over the years. It’s still all about YOU, isn’t it?

2. Lady Fucking Gaga. Or Stefani Fucking Germanotta, take your pick. You want a “dumb fucking pop star”, baby? You’re it. You just couldn’t forgo the proceeds of a single concert, not even in the name of social justice. You couldn’t waste an opportunity to make money, but you COULD waste the opportunity to make a point (the one you thought you were making won’t wash–a state whose profit is made on the backs of undocumented workers DESERVES to suffer economically for punishing them. And as several of Pam’s commenters point out, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, started by Rosa Parks, took over a year to do ITS work, too.) Bet we’ll be seeing you in Israel next, talking about how “dumb fucking pop stars” won’t make a difference in the Gaza blockade, either. After all, there are shekels in it for ya.

3. Abe Fucking Foxman. So wrong on so many levels! No one is entitled to be a bigot. And the survivors of holocausts are the ones upon whom it is most incumbent to show the rest of the world that there is a better way. The ADL missed its calling there, although considering its real history, it’s hardly surprising that they did so. Hedy Epstein should kick Abe’s patookus, but you see, she’s more evolved than that. She prefers to show the better way…by LIVING it.

4. John Fucking Boehner. “All I need to do is listen to the American people…” Which he hasn’t been doing either, or his party wouldn’t have filibustered those people out of jobs. You can start anytime, Cheeto Man.

5. Fucking BP. Bad enough that they’re trying to buy their way out of further liability claims; worse that they’re carpet-bombing the Gulf of Mexico with toxic shit to make it look like nothing really happened. Fishermen are committing suicide, businesses are shutting due to bankruptcy, and all they care about is protecting their bottom line–and their image. Fuck them, fuck them all to hell.

6. and 7. Fucking Target and Best Buy. How the hell could they support a homophobic asswipe like Tom Fucking Emmer? They claim it’s “economic issues”. Well, I guess they don’t care for the big gay dollar; that’s an economic issue too, isn’t it? As is the fact that Emmer already got doused with pennies when he claimed that there are waiters taking home $100,000 a year in tips, and therefore they don’t deserve to make a basic living wage. In fact, restaurant employers and customers both have a nasty habit of stiffing their servers whenever and wherever they think they can get away with it. That’s a serious economic issue, and an insult to working people everywhere.

8. Fucking Microsoft. And they wonder why people hate them so much? Well, if they’re trying to reduce us to mere potential customers for advertising, and our privacy means so little to them, what response were they expecting, exactly?

9. Tom Fucking Shales. Christiane Amanpour is not a terrorist sympathizer, she’s a competent TV reporter who is, unlike so many others, not in the habit of unfairly slanting her stories. The same cannot be said for this creep, who seems strangely obsessed with her–either because she is female, or because she has an “exotic” middle-eastern name, or both.

10. Tamara Fucking Scott. Um, how exactly does same-sex marriage contribute to the problem of “fractured” (I guess that’s the right’s new word for “broken”) families? It doesn’t. The problem is not Teh Ghey, lady, it
‘s the D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Somehow, though, I don’t hear anyone campaigning against that. Or against the right-wing economic policies that are killing so many otherwise good marriages, either.

11. Ali Fucking Khamenei. Just because you don’t like music, doesn’t mean God feels the same way. When did illogical fanaticism become a desirable trait in Iranian religious leaders, anyway? Even the former Cat Stevens, who once famously asked fans to burn his old records, has found out how to reconcile his Muslim beliefs with his musical gifts.

12. Tony Fucking Clement. Fiscal responsibility? What’s that? First it was the $2 billion spent on ~~stormtroopers~~ security for the G-20 summit, now it’s $30 million earmarked for publicity…for a change to the census that nobody wants. And we won’t even get started on those totally unnecessary fighter jets.

13. Liz Fucking Cheney. Yay, another wingtard wench who thinks an Islamic community centre two blocks from Ground Zero is a stab to the heart. Poor oppressed nutters who don’t have to live in the vicinity, yet still feel compelled to opine on what doesn’t faze the locals in the least!

14. Tucker Fucking Carlson. Yeah, you sure did a great job of defending non-partisan journalism from the right-wing nutjobs who thought of it as “fundamentally corrupt”. The entire time you were doing it, you did it from a right-wing nutjob POV. So much easier to do it from the deck of a cruise ship while being wooed by the Paliness, too!

15. Sharron Fucking Angle. The press doesn’t want to be your friend. Neither, I hope, do voters. PS: Oh, holy shite!

16. All the fucking racists, nativists and xenophobes mentioned here. Wankers one and all.

17. Glenn Fucking Beck. Why?

THAT’s why. For anyone who still thinks he’s anti-racist and anti-Nazi, wake the fuck up, he’s neither. He is a racist AND a Nazi for promoting this white-supremacist site (complete with obvious neo-Nazi-style logo, even.)

18. John the Fucking Bigamist. There really are no words, so I’ll say no more.

19. Michaele Fucking Salahi. Oh noes, someone touched her! Oh noes, it’s Whoopi Goldberg! Oh noes, she’s BLACK!!! Help, help, racist assault!!!!

20. Fucking Maclean’s. On behalf of all feminists, fuck you. And your “trashy daughters” issue, too. Ever think that it’s not feminist moms who are to blame for girls turning out trashy, but the trash-promoting media (i.e. YOU)?

21. Fucking Coke. Srsly–you market something as healthy, then claim it’s not, and that you’re not deceiving anyone? Well, at least no one’s fooled that you people are evil. That much we can see straight up.

22. Dan Fucking Maes. All I can say is take it away, Dave:

Yep, even with that LOL of a surname, I’d say that the current mayor of Denver, Colorado is a shoo-in for that gubernatorial seat. With such a fuckheaded opposition, how could he lose?

23. Rick Fucking Scott. Don’t look now, but there’s a horde of angry snowbirds right behind you, asshole.

24. Kevin Fucking Pezzi. Call me funny, but I don’t believe he’s a real doctor, much less a sexpert and an inventor. Any med school that would admit such a charlatan, much less graduate him, is not credible; neither is any board that would grant him a licence. (And I bet his penis is still laughably small, too.) But isn’t it nice to see that Spitefart’s resident hatemonger and pretend stud of the pretend ER is such a master-race titty man?

25. Brian Fucking Lilley. Front-running candidate for Worst Excuse for a Journalist in Canada. Not only is the linked story unbelievable in and of itself (Muslim women in veils NOT getting harassed by security? How fucking stupid do you think we are?), it cites a conveniently anonymous US military man who, oh so conveniently, just happens to be fluent in Arabic and just happened to overhear the supposed women supposedly laughing at the supposed security guard who was supposedly too timid to hassle them. And if you believe that all really happened, I’ve got some lovely oceanfront property in Saskatoon.

26. Chuck Fucking Grassley. I’m sorry, I just gotta do this. Everybody sing: Chuck Chuck Bo Buck, Banana Fanna Fo Fuck, Chuck is a porn schmuck…Chu-huck!

27. Whoever the fuck wrote this goddamn disgusting editorial in the New York Post. Perpetuating the myth that Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, just like that? Bullshit. Japan should apologize before the US acknowledges what ghastly things it did there? Also bullshit. Barack Obama and Ban Ki-Moon are bigger men than this one, and now we see how much bigger they really are. I guess it’s a good thing for the scribbler that editorials go unsigned as a matter of tradition, but this is one tradition that is open to abuse by virtue that very anonymity. And this is a fine example of such abuses. Shame on you, you bloodthirsty, hateful little shit.

28. Sarah Fucking Palin. You can tell a lot about someone’s character just by the following they attract. In the Paliness’s case, it seems, the antipathy she holds for journalists has its wee small echo in that her fans just can’t take any criticism for
their stupidities at all.

29. Goldman Fucking Sachs. Did you know they dealt in high-priced diploma mills? Neither did I. But now we do, thanks to one luckless woman reduced to pole-dancing for a living. Economic ruin laid bare, literally.

30. Tim Fucking Pawlenty. There’s paw-lenty wrong with him (ha–I always wanted to say that!), but let’s just go with this week’s foray into Hardcore Stupidhood. An Islamic centre two blocks away from Ground Zero “disrespects” the victims of 9-11? Oh, sure, Tim, that’ll wash…I mean, it’s not like any Muslims who worked in the Twin Towers were killed that day.

31. Ann Fucking Coulter. How it’s possible to be conservative and gay is a mystery to me. How it’s possible to be all that and give a free pass to a horrible harridan who uses the word “faggot” as an insult (and not ironically, either) is an even bigger mystery. Perhaps her Adam’s apple holds the answer to that one. Shall we ask it?

32. Cathal Fucking Kelly. Wow, of all the things to reduce an entire, proud little Latin American country to, “plane-crash-related cannibalism” has got to be the lowest common denominator. I’m ashamed to say I graduated the same j-school and in the same year as this doofus, but I’m glad he wasn’t in any of my classes. Uruguay just happens to be a two-time World Cup winner–why did he not mention THAT? Shit, I’m not even a sports fan, and I knew it because I just happen to be into all things Latin America! Do your homework next time, dumbass. PS: Those Uruguayan plane crash victims/survivors? They were a RUGBY team, not a SOCCER team. And many of them attributed their solidarity, the real factor in their survival, to that sport. It’s far less conducive to prima donnas than soccer, and far more demanding of group effort. Somebody owes those brave survivors, and their country (which is also a brave survivor–of military coups, false democracy and imperialism) an abject apology for this silly, facile heap of mierda.

33. Juan Manuel Fucking Santos. How big a dickweed is the new president-elect of Colombia? Big enough not to invite Evo to his inauguration, AND to launch spurious complaints against Venezuela in The Hague. Yep, he’s off to a roaring start already–offending other regional leaders before even taking office! PS: Way to co-opt the indigenous, dickweed.

“I don’t believe in Santos” (pun on the Spanish for “saints”).

34. Fucking Shakira. Unconditional support for Juan Manuel Santos, fascist war criminal turned president-elect? The world is “looking at Colombia with hope and optimism”? Uh, NO. Actually, the world is doing a facepalm and declaring you irrelevant. Shut up and sing…oh wait, on second thought, don’t. We’ve heard more than enough of THAT, too.

35. The Fucking Taliban. Last week it was TIME magazine, making cheap political points on a grotesque photo of a mutilated Afghan woman; this week, it’s them. Both parties are full of shit and need to STFU in the worst way.

36. Tony Fucking Venuti. Blacks “benefitted” from, and were “co-conspirators of this abomination called Slavery”? Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Bet it pulled a lot of non-white comers to the Tea Party, too.

37. Larry Fucking Palmer. Some diplomat–even before he gets confirmed as US ambassador to Venezuela, already the interference and unwanted, unfounded opinions start flowing. Sadly, he’ll probably pass his senate confirmation hearings with no problem. Only in Washington could this kind of behavior be considered a qualification for a diplomatic posting.

And finally, to the two short-bus riders who made pit stops here this past week, “Pellanor” and “Sumana”. I’ve already said all I have to say to them, except this one last thing:

Good night, and get fucked!

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Posted in Wankers of the Week | 3 Comments

Economics for Dummies: Dubya’s Deficit, the gift that keeps on giving

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Sabina Becker

The question is, to whom? Look at this chart and tell me who you think it could be, benefiting from the atrocity and obscenity of the US federal deficit: