JABbering Stooge

The GOP in California is pushing hard to get a ballot proposal passed that would change the way that the state’s 55 electoral votes are awarded. Under the proposed rule, the winner of the statewide popular vote would no longer get all the electoral marbles. Instead, he/she would get two electoral votes plus one vote for each congressional district the candidate “wins.”

This sort of system is not new (Maine and Nebraska use similar methods for distributing electoral votes), and had the proposal come up in any other state, I don’t think this would be as big an issue. However, we’re talking about California, which is a) the most populous state in the Union, and thus a hefty political prize, b) long-considered a Democratic stronghold, much as Texas is for the Republicans, and c) California is the only place where this nonsense is being attempted. That, and the fact that the effort is being led by one Thomas Hiltachk, a GOP legal eagle, gives the proposal the strong odor of fetid cow pies.

With Rethuglican chances for victory in ‘08 between slim and none, and slim boarding The Last Train to Clarksville™, the desperation has clearly set in. It’s no longer about subtle hacking of Diebold machines or Tammany Hall-style voter suppression, it’s about naked, ham-fisted bludgeoning of democracy.

“Boss Tweed” would be proud.

From CNN via The Raw Story:

Police: Boss kills workers who asked for raise

EAST POINT, Georgia (AP) — The owner of a car dealership has been accused of killing two employees because they kept asking for pay raises.

If this isn’t class warfare, I’ll eat my “Impeach Cheney?” hat.

d at Lawyers, Guns and Money provides us with this comment on Hugh Hewitt’s wildly bad analogy comparing the Iraqi national soccer team’s recent victory in the Asia Cup to the “Miracle on Ice”:

Now, I don’t mean to understate the capacity of team sports to rescue a society from three decades of near-total obliteration and — of late — foreign occupation, but it seems to me that Hewitt has once again been bobbing for apples in the Goblet of Dumb.

Hmmm…Hugh Hewitt and the Goblet of Dumb? I smell bestseller!!!

Did you hear the one about the Japanese Prime Minister that refused to step down after his party suffered a humiliating defeat in national elections? That’s what happened to current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday, when the ruling Liberal Democratic Party-Shin Komeito coalition government lost its majority status in Japan’s House of Councillors. In addition to calls for Abe to resign as Prime Minister and head of the right-wing party that has dominated Japanese politics since the end of the Occupation, the embattled Prime Minister has been under tremendous pressure to announce a snap election to determine control of the lower house of the Diet.

From the moment he was elected to succeed Junichiro Koizumi, the Abe government has lurched from one scandal to another, much as the Bush administration has done here in the U.S. ever since Hurricane Katrina brutally rubbed our noses in Bush’s fallibility. If this proves to be the LDP’s political Waterloo that leaves them out in the wilderness for a while - and to be honest, Jerry Falwell has a better chance of coming back to life and announcing that he’s gay - then Japan will be all the better for it. As I’ve said before, despite its name, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party is hardly democratic, much less liberal. Frankly, the I don’t think the world can stand much more right-wing domination of any country’s politics.

Marvin Zindler is dead. The TV reporter famed for his exposure of the Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange, Texas in 1973 succumbed to pancreatic cancer just 12 days shy of his 86th birthday.

Zindler’s Friday-night restaurant reports were the one bright spot of the two-and-a-half years I spent in the hellhole known as The Woodlands, Texas. They were clever and entertaining, and I was always excited whenever the words “Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime in the ice machine!” boomed out across the airwaves. Fun times.

You’ll be missed, Marv. Let us know if there’s any slime in heaven’s ice machines, OK?

Amanda and Glenn Greenwald have made some good points about O’Reilly’s terrorist fans and O’Reilly’s head-in-the-sand approach to the eliminationist fantasies his “premium members” harbor on a fairly regular basis.

Note to Bill, as comedian George Carlin once said, “Let’s not have a double standard here. One standard will do just fine!” Not that the Lord of the Loofahs will listen, since a) I’m only a sub-Z-list blogger, and b) Bill-O has demonstrated a willful denial of reality that is superhuman in nature. He takes a small, unrepresentative sample of the comments on DailyKos and inflates them to the point where he implies that the site consists of NOTHING BUT these comments. Meanwhile, when the same standard he applies to DailyKos is applied to him, he does the pundit equivalent of “LAH-LAH-LAH-LAH-I CAN’T HEAR YOU LEGITIMATELY CRITICIZE ME WITH THE TRUTH!” He would do this even if you were to slap him in the face with the transcript.

C’mon, Bill. This is excessively childish, and can only serve to demonstrate to all how utterly insane and delusional you are, and summarily lead to your ratings going from mere slump to precipitous termial-velocity freefall. You’re only hurting yourself - oops, too late.

In Bill-O’s sick, twisted world, this NEVER happens…

…while this happens 6.02 x 10²³ times per picosecond at any web site with the temerity to express an opinion to the left of Pinochet.

ABC’s Washington bureau has been evacuated after receiving a suspicious envelope. This is just the latest in a series of hoax and/or real anthrax mailings sent to liberals or organizations perceived to be liberal. If I were the police, I’d start looking at the devoted followers of Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter.

Because I’m having an increasingly difficult time telling America under conservative domination apart from Soviet Russia and its client states. The latest example: the recent revelation of the FBI’s desire to steal a page from the Stasi by building a network of domestic informants to spy on their fellow citizens. Given the blatant politicization of the Justice Department, how are we to believe that this will be used in any other way than to effectively criminalize dissent from The Most Holy George W. Christ?

And consider the implications of this when combined with Bush’s abuse-friendly executive order to confiscate the assets of anyone deemed by the Secretary of the Treasury to be even the slightest POTENTIAL threat to Iraqi reconstruction. Michelle Malkin is probably in a state of constant orgasm at this news.

With nothing better to do, MSRNC brings us a report on a cat with an uncanny ability to tell when terminally ill patients are about to die.

This is Oscar, the resident cat at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, RI. Normally, he’s your stereotypical aloof, uncaring cat. However, whenever he senses that a person is about to die, he curls up on their bed and goes to sleep. The person he “picks” winds up dead a few hours later. He’s so accurate that the staff at the facility has taken to notifying the next-of-kin when he’s seen hanging around a patient.

I don’t know about you, but when it finally comes to be my time to die, I can’t think of a better way to go out than with a cat gently purring in my arms. In a way, Oscar’s role seems to be much like that of the character Andrew in Touched by an Angel (played by John Dye - hence the title of this post). Unfortunately, given the current rise in “Christians” trying to take us back to the 12th century, coupled with the fact that there’s already at least one family that was disturbed by Oscar’s…”ability”… I can’t help but worry that at some point someone will try to do this to him:

Teen California Girls Charged With Animal Cruelty as Burned Cat Clings to Life

Thursday, July 19, 2007

COTATI, Calif. — A 3-month-old cat is clinging to life at a Sonoma County animal hospital after having been set on fire by two teenage girls who now face charges of animal cruelty.

*snip*

The cat, one of several feral felines trapped for spaying and neutering, was in a cage outside an apartment in Santa Rosa when two 15-year-old girls allegedly poured flammable liquid on the animal and set it on fire last month.

An 11-year-old boy and his friend saw the smoke and heard the cat, then eight weeks old, shrieking while the girls laughed. The girls, whose names have not been released, were charged with cruelty to animals in Sonoma County Juvenile Court last week.

There is a special place reserved in Hell for those who do harm to animals, especially those who do harm to cats.

Four more Firedman Units! Four more Friedman Units! Four more Friedman Units!