Maybe Right-Wing Oklahoma Lawmakers Are Right to Ban AP U.S. History

After all, look at me, I graduated with honors from a major university as a history major, elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta, and I was twisted into a fucking liberal!  If that doesn't prove that studying history is evil, I don't know what does.

If the legislature doesn't act, kids in
 Tulsa might be seen wearing these.

If only the Oklahoma state legislature had been there to straighten out nefarious educators in the 60s and 70s and save me from all those pointy-headed teachers and professors in Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, who conspired with national teachers' unions (and maybe the Communist Party) to twist my young mind against the beauties of unquestioning patriotism and myths about our founding as God's Beacon of American Exceptionalism, and taught me to "think" (as if that were a good thing).

"...I want my...I want my...I want my dumb TV..."

The following two quotations are from WNYC's The Takeaway today, "Your TV Is Listening to You. And Messing With It Could Be a Felony" about Samsung's new smart TV and its built-in camera and microphone. 

The first quote is from the Samsung privacy policy packed with your new smart television:

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

The second quote is from George Orwell's 1984 (the future simply arrived three decades later than predicted):

“Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.”

Here's the full radio segment for your listening pleasure:

Bob Marley would be turning 70 today.

Here he is playing 'Lively Up Yourself' less than a year before cancer took him from us:

Patti Smith on William S. Burroughs

There are so many reasons to love Patti Smith, as anyone who watches this whole video will be reminded, but on what would have been William Burroughs' 101st birthday, watch it at least for what she has to say about his advice to a young Patti at the 59 second mark:

"Build a good name," Burroughs told her. "Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, you know, that name will be its own currency."

If Bush and Cheney are ever brought to justice ...

OK. Please stop laughing, BUT IF George Bush and Dick Cheney are ever brought to justice for war crimes generally, and specifically for the illegal and unjustified destruction of Iraq, then this article in The New York Times today, "Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report," should play at least some role in their prosecution. If they really were classifying parts of the 9/11 commission report in December 2002 that showed actual links to Saudi officials while still ginning up fictional ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to begin their war, then this piece of evidence shouldn't be forgotten at their trial (again, please stop laughing).

This issue isn't even new, as shown by this exchange between Dick Cheney and Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on September 14, 2003, when we were only six months into our never-ending war along the Tigris and Euphrates. Cheney was still trotting out discredited Iraqi links and there were already rumors about the Saudi government connections contained in the suppressed sections of the 9/11 Report:

Dick Cheney: ... With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.

Tim Russert: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.

Cheney: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.

Russert: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.

Cheney: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. ..."

The shorter version? It's perfectly fine if the fictional Czech story of the Iraqi link is somehow "public out there" (with no help from Bush and Cheney, obviously), but the true Saudi link needs to be kept from the public.

Now for the happy musical outro courtesy of Michael Moore and REM who put all of this into a 2004 movie:

It must be so easy to be @realDonaldTrump

You can simply blame everything, even something as unrelated as an unsuccessful play in last night's Superbowl, on President Obama:

It must have been President Obama that called in what will go down as the DUMBEST PLAY IN THE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL. Same thought process!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2015

What would Stephen Fry say if he were confronted by God at the pearly gates?

This is two minutes and 24 seconds worth watching:

"Bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you?"

Sarah Palin & Donald Trump must be pissed at The New York Times (again)

In this chart on the Times website today, those pointy-headed eastern liberals list the following twelve potential candidates as expected to compete for places on the stage of the 2016 GOP Clown Circus: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson.
No Donald?
No Sarah?
How can they not take this woman seriously as a candidate for the clown college?

Watch a cantankerous old Senator confront Code Pink: "Get Out of Here You Low-Life Scum!"

Think for a second how close John McCain came to becoming President until he committed political suicide with his vice-presidential pick. You can see him bravely confront senior citizens with signs at the three-minute mark of this video.


It's also worth thinking about how many bombing raids were supported by all three former Secretaries of State in this Armed Services Committee hearing: Kissinger, Schultz, and Albright. They remind us that there was no lack of American military aggression around the world long before Dubya took it to a new level.

WOO HOO! We may have ourselves a full-fledged Clown Circus for the ages in 2016!

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told The Washington Post in an interview Friday that she is “seriously interested” in running for the White House in 2016.

“You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested,” Palin said, when asked to clarify her thinking about a possible presidential bid.

Seriously.