Mystery guest, would you sign in please

What world leader are the following news stories from last year about?

A)[. . .] opposition television station [N], which has led coverage of ongoing anti-government protests, said it had gone off the air after its building was stormed by special police forces wielding guns.

After the station announced it was being stormed, the signal was turned off to viewers[. . .]


B)[. . .] [X] on Tuesday ordered riot police dressed in black and wearing balaclavas to disperse protesting crowds with tear gas, water cannons, batons and fists. [. . .] "I was sitting in the car, not able to drive away because of the crush of people, not believing my eyes," he recalls. "Right in front of me [. . .] policemen were beating young and old people; some were on the ground badly injured. It was the scariest thing I have ever seen."

[. . .]He's ordered the use of force against peaceful demonstrators—with 360 people ending up in the hospital. Opposition leaders [. . .] have [. . .] disappeared after warrants were issued for their arrest[. . .]

[. . .] [X] was tested, and his instincts were those of a post-Soviet strongman [. . .]

Hint - it's not this guy.

Answers in comments.

Hey, thanks, guys

Break out the entrenching tools and the survival crackers, 'cause it looks like the bad old days of Duck & Cover may be making a return:

Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithuania. A senior military source in Moscow said the fleet had suffered from underfunding since the collapse of communism. “That will change now,” said the source.

“In view of America’s determination to set up a missile defence shield in Europe, the military is reviewing all its plans to give Washington an adequate response.”

Hey, thanks, you neocon dumbasses. No, it wasn't bad enough to use 3,000 corpses to shore up your dreams of Pax Americana. It wasn't bad enough to flip the bird to the rest of the world and renounce practically every international treaty we'd ever agreed to. It wasn't bad enough to drag the U.S. into yet another Vietnam 'cause you were just sooooo goddamn convinced we'd win THIS one. No, now you've got the Russians looking at all that Reagan was JUST SO DAMN CLEVER in getting them to spend money on and saying "Hm, maybe we could put all this to some use!". Why worry about the long-distant Iranian nuclear program? The Russians HAVE nukes! Hey, let's piss them off! Wheee! I can't see HOW that could go massively, massively wrong.

Whatever you do... don't mention the war!

Media Matters:

Referring to a response given by Sen. John McCain at the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, Fox News' Gretchen Carlson asserted that "he doesn't like to talk about when he was a POW."

Of course not. That's everybody else's job.

A couple lil' questions

A) Who the hell is Rick Warren and why do I care what the thinks about anything?

B) Why do we need to vet Presidential candidates in front of pastors, anyway? What the hell ever happened to "separation of church and state"?

We're white, we're white, we're really really white...

...we're really really really whiiiite:

(CNN) – Carly Fiorina, a supporter of Sen. John McCain and the chair of the Republican National Committee’s Victory 2008 campaign, took aim at Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean over racially-tinged comments Dean made Friday.

“If you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in the Republican Party,” Dean said Friday in an appearance on NPR’s “Tell Me More” program.

Fiorina, a prominent female supporter of McCain, fired back at Dean. “It is disappointing to see Howard Dean trying to use gender and race to divide voters," Fiorina said Friday evening in a statement released by the McCain campaign. "His comments are insulting, inappropriate and have no place in this election.”

Oh, yes, 'cause there we just SO MANY people of color attending, oh, say, the 2004 RNC convention:









And Fiorina's comment is interesting, given that the Dems were the first ones to even attempt to run a woman as a candidate. Where are the Republican women who're qualified to run for President? What happened to the big talk a few years back about Elizabeth Dole as a candidate?

Or is there an unspoken assumption in the Party that their base wouldn't accept A GI-RUL as President?

(Hey! TWO, count 'em TWO MST3K references in one lil' post!)

You snooze...

Well, I waited to finish that last post so long that the whole situation is moot. Georgia and Russia have both signed cease-fire agreements, and, beyond further hijinks on either side, the crisis is apparently over.

It remains, though, to be seen what the U.S. could have possibly done to calm the situation. Regardless of who was in charge at the time, the military is overdrawn in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even the Secretary of War Defense couldn't see a role for combat forces.

The U.S. was hardly a fair mediator in the crisis - from the Georgian President being feted on CNN to questions about U.S. interests in Caucasus oil to the role of McCain's foreign policy adviser with respect to Georgia to airlifting Georgian troops home from Iraq to Tblisi street names. And as Juan Cole, among others, points out, we dug this hole ourselves:

The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

As well, the United States continues to discover that pissing off countries who failed to fall in line with Georgie's Great Mesopotamian Adventure has consequences:

WASHINGTON — President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Furthermore the Russians have a few issues with the West that make our cries of outrage less audible to their ears:

Of course, that’s only the beginning of the stupidity. How is it, by the by, that Russia went from being a former superpower on the way toward becoming a third world country — so severely flattened that the very life span of its citizens had decreased by some ten years or so — to now racing back toward becoming a global great power again, and a very pissed off one at that? Well, one good explanation would certainly have to do with how the US reacted as the country was imploding in the 1990s. Rather than reaching out with Marshall Plan type assistance, we sent an army of right-wing economists instead, who advised privatizing everything in sight. Which they largely did, and largely to disastrous consequences. One of Putin’s achievements has been to regain the primacy of the state, and bring the hammer down on the latter-day robber barons who were formerly carting it off, piece by petro piece. In doing so, he has restored a measure of Russian dignity following the humiliation of the triumphalist US fire-sale treatment, and along with that comes no small degree of national pride at humbling exploitive and supremely arrogant Americans.

These sentiments were only further exacerbated by the expansion of NATO deep into the traditional Russian sphere of influence, and the unilateral American scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue the military-industrial complex’s greatest boondoggle ever, a missile ‘defense’ system, now being deployed in Eastern Europe. Lastly, as if antagonizing a potential enemy wasn’t stupid enough, the bright candles in charge of American foreign policy have done so while completely failing to significantly wean the country off of our petroleum addiction, all while driving up prices dramatically. Hey, guess who’s got a whole ocean of oil at their disposal? Guess which country is growing rich and powerful because of that? Guess who is able to throw its political weight around based on this economic power?

We did this to ourselves. We're responsible for whatever comes next. As Fred Kaplan points out in this Slate article, what we need now is a willingness to negotiate, to hold conferences, to talk to people unlike we've been doing for the last eight years.

In short, the kind of thing Obama's been criticized for wanting to do.

We got to this point by acting like snotty kids, crying "YOU AIN'T THE BOSS OF ME!" and doing what we damn well wanted. Only way out of it is to cut that crap out and start acting like adults.

OH FOR PETE'S SAKE JEEZUL ALREADY

Atrios likes to snark about how "X" is "obviously good news" for Bush/McCain/the Repugs. Stuff like "100 killed in Iraq multiple bombing" or "Iran threatens Gulf shipping" or - hey, like "Russia invades Georgia"!

Welp, the reality isn't far off - evidently an (unpaid - whee, now there's a plum job) adviser to McSame's campaign really believes the CF in the Caucasus is good news for Grumpy, 'cause he reacted so manly:

Forty years later, Russian tanks are rolling once more over their neighbors, and the images that are shaping Americans' lasting perceptions are of a president playing in the sand with the women's beach volleyball team and the presumptive Democratic nominee alternately walking along Kailua Beach and playing golf in Hawaii.

[snip]

In contrast to both Bush and Obama, McCain conveyed strength and determination. While Obama timidly urged Georgia and Russia to "show restraint and to avoid an escalation to full-scale war," McCain took to the airwaves to deliver a blunt warning to Russian President Dimitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Your actions will have "severe, long-term negative consequences" for relations with the United States and Europe, McCain declared, as he outlined a plan of action for the West to isolate and punish Russia.

Oh, dear, somebody's acting like he's President already, making demands of other countries! How presumptuous of him!

Ah, yes, "strength and determination", like calling on the already-overstretched NATO (already deployed in someplace called Afghanistan) to see what they can do to "stabilize" the situation, which the eXile's Mark Ames calls "stark-raving":

Calling on NATO to “stabilize this dangerous situation” is not going down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have put the country in a very vengeful mood. It’s hard to imagine what measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and who runs around singing “Bomb Bomb Iran!” it’s not hard to guess–and even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009, should he win.

Mind you, McSame also calls on the U.N. to convene a meeting of the Security Council on the matter... which is, well, let's let Mr. Ames explain:

But McCain’s brain remains undeterred by reality, a fact that became painfully clear today in Des Moines when he also demanded, “The US should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course.”

The problem with McCain’s bold demand about going to the UN is that Russia already tried doing exactly what McCain called for–and got rejected by McCain’s neocon pals in the Bush Administration. Early this morning, Russia convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council, calling on both sides to immediately cease hostilities, return to the negotiating table and renounce the use of force–but the last part about renouncing the use of force is exactly what Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili refuses to do.

Ah. Strength and determination, indeed.

What manly action did Grumpy indeed pose for dealing with the situation?

As soon as possible my colleagues senators Lieberman and Graham will be traveling to Georgia. They're both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Oh, good 'cause they were so influential in Iraq. No carpets on sale in Georgia, I think, but maybe Graham can pick up some of those lil' Russian dolls with dolls inside them instead.

But back to that CNN commentary for the finish:

One thing Obama ought to see, however, and soon, is the tarmac at Honolulu International Airport. He needs to realize that, when you're president, you're not always in control of events, including vacations. If he fails to cut this holiday short, he might soon wind up being remembered as the guy who blew his chance to be president because he played on the beach while the Russian tanks rolled through Georgia.

Ah, yes. "When you're president, you're not always in control of events, including vacations". Oh, my, yes. (waiting for any evidence Ms. Sanchez criticized Bush at the time...)

I feel like Tom Lehrer

Even if it was essentially an apocryphal comment, I feel rather like Lehrer did upon having heard Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the end of a previous post I jokingly suggested that gas prices had fallen recently because the Republicans had been bloviating into empty microphones. Little did I know that at least one of the Repugs themselves thought that this was true.

From Paul Krugman's column, 8/7/08:

In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

In addition to the above, we get this from one of Rep. Shadegg's peers:

And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

There's an unspoken air of "Dems want to control where you go and what you do" in that comment, which I would dismiss if I didn't recall hearing Limbaugh make similar comments several years back in opposition to expanded mass transit.

You can't parody these people.

A Question

Say you're a prospective bail bondsman who's just been picked up by the Secret Service for making threats against a Presidential candidate.

During the interview, do you:

A) Cooperate to the fullest with the authorities, even if you don't want to, ensuring that your butt gets back out into free air ASAP,

Or do you

B) Make a stupid joke that just digs the pit you're standing in deeper?

Why, I think we know the answer to that now:

During an interview with the Secret Service, Geisel denied threatening Obama, but told agents that "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he would simply shoot him with a sniper rifle."

He later said that comment was a joke, the agent said in the document.

Hey, let's take this clown out back and waterboard him for a half-hour or so, then tell him it "was just all a joke". No harm, after all, and undoubtedly he's one of these folks who doesn't beleive it qualifies as torture.

(Special bonus from that Wikipedia link at the top:

Bail bond agents are almost exclusively found in the United States. In most other countries bail is usually more modest and the practice of bounty hunting is illegal.

Wheee! U-S-A! U-S-A! *snif* I feel such a surge of patriotism at knowing that. God bless America, where we stubbornly retain the great tradition of treating human beings as profit-making resources in SO many innovative ways.)

Classy

The Repugs, in their fourth day of kicking their heels and whining over not being able to drill domestically, played their trump card and brought in everyone's favorite lizard:

House Republicans brought Gingrich to the Capitol on Wednesday, partly to revive media coverage of their speech-making protest in the chamber, now in its fourth day.

The rest of Congress is gone for August recess, but several Republican House members have been speaking on the floor of the closed-down chamber, calling for a special session to vote on drilling and energy.

Gingrich did attract more camera crews, and he used the opportunity to point to what may be the GOP's next strategy: If Democrats refuse to hold a separate vote on oil drilling, Republicans could try to block the votes needed to keep government running past September 30.

Oh, classy, guys. Holding the Federal government hostage until the Dems kowtow to your temper tantrum. Thank god the adults are back in charge.

For a little context, let's recall a couple years back and this admirable act of maturity from the responsible Republicans:

After repeated criticism of the Bush administration, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday gaveled a hearing to a close and walked out while Democrats continued to testify -- but with their microphones shut off.

The hearing's announced topic was the USA Patriot Act, which granted broad new powers to federal law enforcement after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Republicans had presented several witnesses at earlier hearings who supported the administration's call for reauthorizing the legislation. But yesterday, when four witnesses handpicked by the Democrats launched into a broad denunciations of President Bush's war on terrorism and the condition of detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) showed his pique.

He urged witnesses to "wrap it up" and repeatedly told committee members that their time for questioning had expired.

"We ought to stick to the subject," the chairman scolded at the end. "The Patriot Act has nothing to do with Guantanamo Bay. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with enemy combatants. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with indefinite detentions."

"Will the gentleman yield?" Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) asked.

"No, I will not yield," replied Sensenbrenner, 61, the heir to a paper fortune who is known for a brusque insistence on decorum. He completed his reproof of the witnesses and left the Rayburn House Office Building hearing room amid a cacophony of protests from Democrats seeking to be recognized.

Oh, but that was about civil liberties, and who gives a rat's ass about those, anyway? The Repugs are talking about offshore drilling which would lower gas prices! And the communist Pelosi walked out on them, betraying the American people!

Of course, meanwhile back in the Real World, gas prices have been falling at the pump for the last three weeks straight. Without drilling in ANWAR, without drilling offshore, without drilling any more than anyone was to begin with:

Gas prices have eased substantially in recent weeks amid signs that global demand for petroleum products is slowing.

Ah. Supply and demand. The Free Market. Well.

Or maybe it's the fact that the Repugs have been standing in an empty building talking to themselves into dead microphones. Maybe they should do that more often.

GRR TYSON R UNAMRICAN

The (I'm sure) lovely Southern Beale covered this the other day - evidently the largely Somali refugee-Muslim workforce of the Tyson poultry plant in Shelbyville, TN has gotten the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr off as a paid holiday, in exchange for Labor Day.

Cue predictable wingnut hysteria and hatred.

Southern Beale has a couple references:

Over the weekend Kleinheider did a round-up of some local bloggers’ opinions. Some of the saddest ones include this one from Michael Hurtt, headlined “This Is How It Starts”:

This is a frightening example of incrementalism, the process by which groups achieve partial means to an ultimate end. For those who believe that the current fight in the Middle East is religious in nature, this concession by Tyson brings us one step closer to accepting Sharia Law as the law of the land in the U.S.

First they came for Labor Day, and because I had to work at the mall on Labor Day I said nothing ....

The funniest thing is to watch “free marketers” struggle as their economic philosophy does battle with their bigotry. For example, Six Meat Buffet:

On one hand I’m torn. A private business should be able to give everyone 365 days off a year if they want. On the other hand, replacing Labor Day for a holiday to placate the most violent, intolerant, misogynistic religion on the planet may not be the greatest idea.

Why, what a shining example of tolerance you display in that comment, SMB! Thanks for making my point for me.

And, if you have the stomach, it's not difficult to locate The Usual Suspects whining about the situation, such as this lil' ray of sunshine who implies that the EEEEVIL KLINTONS are behind this:

The State Department has been importing entire Muslim communities for the express purpose of companies like Tyson. The jihad is coming quietly to American by the intentional building of Muslim populations in small to medium American cities. Whole communities are being importing from countries like Somalia with the tacit approval of the State Department and the complicity of companies like Clintonista backed Tyson Foods.

That last is sourced to "Atlas Shrugs & WND" --- oooh, now THERE'S a couple of impartial sources!

Now FAUX News ("twice the stupid at half the price!") has decided to feature this story on their front page, and, classy as ever, make it sound as if the entirety of Tyson Foods had had this change, instead of the one Musilm-majority Tenessee plant:

Working Labor Day, Off Eid al-Fitr

Tyson Foods workers will be hard at work on Labor Day, instead they've been granted Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr

Oh, thanks, FAUX. I'm sure there'll be a massive outcry now and Tyson will be forced to reverse this policy, forcing a bunch of people who do one of the most dangerous, thankless jobs in this country to lose something they politely requested, to placate your audience of no-neck mouthbreathing humanoid nativists. Wheee.