US and Egyptian special forces have reportedly been providing covert training to rebel fighters in the battle for Libya, Al Jazeera has been told. An unnamed rebel source related how he had undergone training in military techniques at a “secret facility” in eastern Libya.
@Joe Beese: actually Joe, that’s proof that you’re whistling past the graveyard again. The CIA is chock full of special forces guys helping to teach folks the basics of firing weapons. They are there so our infinitely well trained infantry divisions don’t have to be and are allowing the Libyans to fight their fight themselves, granted with a lot of special assistance so the fight wouldn’t turn out to be tanks versus handguns. Makes sense that some of our special forces guys have to be involved, after all, who makes more arms than us?
8.
geg6
There is a very, very scary looking sky outside my office window. I have a feeling that very soon I will not be able to access the internet due to lack of electricity.
Which basically means that in addition to not being able to goof off on BJ, I will also not be able to do any work.
9.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
I continue to find myself utterly depressed at the state of politics and general public opinion in America these days. I mean…seriously, go onto a comments section on just about any major newspaper or news outlet, from the NYTimes, to the WaPo, to Guardian, to even the more abashedly right wing nutteries. Then look at the discourse in general. From Climate Change to economics to plain politics in general, the ‘accepted’ narratives and lines from the majority seem to echo perfectly with your standard right wing troll, and it’s getting nowhere better, and it seems totally utterly fucking impenetrable. We are literally run by trolls, because our leaders seem to go out of their way to listen to no one else but people who, if they were online, would simply be Poe’s Law-invoking trolls.
I seriously just want to tear my hair out when I get into things about Global Warming, and comments end up with trolls on about ‘REAL LIFE IS COMPLEX, THE MODELS LIE!!!’, and….we end up with the fucking EPA gutted, fracking galore, and stupidity about how ‘we can’t take a chance on green energy, it costs too much and it doesn’t make enough anyhow!’ Especially when people were screeching about investing in non-fossil fuel energy for decades so we could actually have the tech to make it viable NOW. But oh no, the Trolls say ‘ALL GUBMENT SPENDING IS EVILLLLLL!!!’ and thus the only investments we make are on how to totally fuck over the working class while giving multinationals billions in tax rebates because ‘that’s how you make jobs’.
@Joe Beese: Go ahead and knock yourself out with every new outrage. Here’s a brutal truth about America in the year 2011.
No one gives a shit.
12.
Amir_Khalid
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in Cannes to launch his TV cartoon show “The Governator”. Per the Grauniad:
The show is loosely based on Schwarzenegger’s recent political career, with an animated post-governor Arnie fighting crime and natural disasters while trying to “make it home for dinner every night”.
This may say something about how politicians see themselves, but I’m not quite sure what.
I just have to hope that the press, in its constant pursuit of the Next New Thing, will eventually discover that they are bored to death with the right-wing worldview.
Plus, ANY political philosophy carried to extremes will eventually undermine/destroy itself, and the Republicans are well into their extremist phase now. How long it will take for the endgame to play out and how much damage will be done in the meantime is the question, not their eventual downfall.
Indeed, but devil his due, this is how we began in Vietnam, isn’t it?
This is how we begin any military engagement. We were arming and training Iranians and Nicaraguan Contras and Afghanistan rebels and Eastern European dissidents and Columbian paramilitaries all through the 70s and 80s. Not every military engagement is Vietnam.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be wary. Just that this isn’t a huge deviation from the script.
@Virginia Highlander: true, also see Afghanistan, yet each is different and unique. Vietnam was to clean up after the French and Afghanistan to spitball the Soviets, both were Cold War extensions by proxy. Who is backing Qaddafi?
Not saying that there couldn’t be parallels to Iraq, because the power vacuum left behind could turn out to be filled by who knows what, what infrastructure is there? The hard part with replacing dictators is having to build/create all of those pieces of governance, from local rule all the way up to and including, who keeps the lights on. That’s the part where I think we screwed up in Iraq (imho) is that we didn’t put enough effort into rebuilding it as we went along (civil wars will kind of do that though, one helluva distraction) and the efforts that were made weren’t enough.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only time the media gets bored of the right-wing extreme mindset is when it becomes not extreme enough. All the while blissfully tarring anyone to the left of Evan Bayh as the Most Soshuliztic America Hating Hippie Evar.
I’m honestly convinced it never WILL end at this point. Peak Wingnut is a lie. Peak Sanity has already come, gone, and faded out the rear view mirror ages ago.
Chavez, for starters, something I suspect is a misstep for his “Bolivarian Revolution”, or at least his leadership role therein. That he would back Gaddafi should not surprise anyone, at least in retrospect.
This is how we begin any military engagement. We were arming and training Iranians and Nicaraguan Contras and Afghanistan rebels and Eastern European dissidents and Columbian paramilitaries all through the 70s and 80s. Not every military engagement is Vietnam.
I knew about everything except the Colombian paramilitaries. Did we help create the AUC? I wasn’t aware of that – I thought for once, it was an area of the world where we hated both sides of the conflict.
Also, were there violent groups in Eastern Europe that we supported? I have a hard time buying that, not because I don’t think we would’ve done it but because I thought the police states in Eastern Europe had been pretty good at stomping out any armed resistance (and most resistance period).
23.
Paul in KY
@A Farmer: That’s a tough one. I’d have to say Wisconsin, with Ohio right behind.
24.
Julia Grey
I’m honestly convinced it never WILL end at this point. Peak Wingnut is a lie. Peak Sanity has already come, gone, and faded out the rear view mirror ages ago.
I can’t believe that, see, because I have children. I must have faith the the “arc of history.”
Besides, there are still sane people out there. We’re still here, right?
It occurs to me that for feeling helpless and hopeless, there must not have been anything more stunning and demoralizing to sane Germans than the rise of Hitler and the descent of the iron grip of the Reich. Yet even they, with all their apparently unstoppable power, didn’t last forever.
That doesn’t exactly give me much comfort. The idea that it’d take being on the losing side of a world war for us to correct ourselves is about the extreme opposite of comforting.
And yeah, we’re here. But we’re essentially voiceless too, even at our loudest. A hundred thousand of us simply don’t stand up to about 150 teabaggers as far as the public discourse goes.
Plus, ANY political philosophy carried to extremes will eventually undermine/destroy itself, and the Republicans are well into their extremist phase now. How long it will take for the endgame to play out and how much damage will be done in the meantime is the question, not their eventual downfall.
Some of the more calmly, cynically calculating right-wing politicians actually do understand that for a variety of reasons they’re at high risk of suffering electoral burnout within the foreseeable future. One of their main short-term goals over the next two to as long as six years (i.e. as long as they retain influence via the crop of winger politicians elected in 2010) is to inflict so much structural wreckage on the federal government, and erect as many difficult structural obstacles in the way of repairing it, that it won’t matter if they suffer becoming a 35% political minority for even a few decades to follow. They’re out to scorch the ground and salt the earth.
36.
singfoom
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik: It’s a rough time for those of us that are sane. It’s hard to resist just throwing your hands up and saying “fuck it”. Just hang in there, and realize that there are other rational people left, and sometimes they even vote.
Encourage others to approach politics rationally instead of emotionally. In time hopefully it will change.
Personally, I’m waiting for a SCOTUS reversal on Citizens United, or some fucking thing to get rid of our system of legalized bribery.
Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but I can still hope.
@PaulW: yeah but in Arizona, we have Cactus Barbie, who sees headless bodies in the desert, believes that while we can fund rest stops for weary interstate travelers through our state that people on the organ transplant list have to go without. She also has a fine grasp of mathematical nuance, by refusing to fund the state’s public health system so she then can be denied the two-thirds in federal matching funds for their care. The new budget that she will sign is a death knell for local health care as rural clinics will no longer be able to stay open AND she calls herself the education governor by whacking 454m from the educational budget, No one was spared, community colleges, big universities and K-12, all got hammered.
38.
steve
Tina Brown is on Diane Rehm
Isn’t that the show where they have a guest speak, then they torture a tranquilized housecat for a few seconds, then the guest again, then back to the cat,…?
39.
gene108
I really wish there liberal dirty f’in hippie billionaires, who would blindly fund media operations, like the right-wingers have done.
I don’t know, if you can be a billionaire and a liberal dirty f’in hippie at the same time. I think those modes of existence are incompatible, which maybe why there’s so little liberal media presence in this country and it has been totally swallowed by the right-wingers.
I think sometime in the 1990’s, the MSM decided all those right-wing publications, which started up in the 1980’s, like American Spectator and The Washington Times, were serious news organizations and started reprinting what they were writing.
America is still paying the price for the lack of attention the MSM paid, in the 1990’s, because that led to the election of Bush, Jr., who ran on a platform of “restoring honor the White House”. It worked because people were sick of the scandals swirling around the Clinton White House.
I think any MSM reporter, who seriously gave time to White Water as a major issue of the day, should have all their assets confiscated and used to pay down the debt, they helped create by enabling the Republicans way back when.
Right now, I think it’s too late, because the Right’s media presence is ubiquitous.
40.
Xenos
Any reactions from the teapartisans in their motorized chairs about Paul Ryan’s attempt to take the government out of Medicare by ending the program entirely?
I can’t seem to find any one on the right who is happy or unhappy about this. Like the hundreds of thousands rallying for Wisconsin unions, it is just not newsworthy.
Any reactions from the teapartisans in their motorized chairs about Paul Ryan’s attempt to take the government out of Medicare by ending the program entirely?
He’s not taking away their Medicare. They get grandfathered into what they have. It’s the people 55 and under, who will get screwed, which is about right, since the 55 and under crowd isn’t a reliable voting block for Republicans.
42.
Joe Beese
Profile in Courage:
Attorney General Eric Holder today will announce that self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be tried in a military commission, the CBS News Investigative Unit has learned. A source says the commission will be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. … Trying Mohammed in a civilian court and closing the Guantanamo prison were once some of the Obama administration’s top priorities, but political realities have hamstrung both goals.
@A Farmer: Well, so far PA isn’t trying to shut down local governments and sell them to the highest bidder. So I’ll vote for Michigan.
Of course, it gets a bit complicated in PA (Wikipedia):
There are five types of local governments listed in the Pennsylvania Constitution; county, township, borough, city, and school district. All of Pennsylvania is included in one of the state’s 67 counties and each county is then divided into one of the state’s 2,562 municipalities. Each municipality, except boroughs, are then classified according to their population. There are currently nine classifications for counties, four classes of cities, two classes of townships, and five classes of school districts.
44.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Zifnab: @Just Some Fuckhead: Nope to both of ya… this is about the upcoming Canadian election. The Canadian right wing has gotten itself some dough to hire astroturfers.
I suppose the true drama over getting home for dinner will generally revolve around the 500-mile daily flight to get there. Lord, how I don’t miss him.
The CIA is chock full of special forces guys helping to teach folks the basics of firing weapons. … Makes sense that some of our special forces guys have to be involved, after all, who makes more arms than us?
Actually, this doesn’t make sense for what is supposed to be a short term mission. If Libya’s army commanders cannot be “persuaded” to stand down or switch sides, there is not much hope for the rebels who don’t appear to be very organized at all.
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Paul in KY
Going to see her & rest of band at Bonnaroo in early June. Really looking forward to it. Thanks for the music.
Zifnab
DougJ! The gauntlet has been thrown!
Do you accept?
http://i.imgur.com/QAcJm.jpg
stuckinred
My home girl from Champaign, Illinois!
stuckinred
Jerry Douglas, King of the Carolina Dobro!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Zifnab: That must be the outfit Nick works for.
Joe Beese
The “no boots on the ground” lie exposed further.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/04/201142172443133798.html
piratedan
@Joe Beese: actually Joe, that’s proof that you’re whistling past the graveyard again. The CIA is chock full of special forces guys helping to teach folks the basics of firing weapons. They are there so our infinitely well trained infantry divisions don’t have to be and are allowing the Libyans to fight their fight themselves, granted with a lot of special assistance so the fight wouldn’t turn out to be tanks versus handguns. Makes sense that some of our special forces guys have to be involved, after all, who makes more arms than us?
geg6
There is a very, very scary looking sky outside my office window. I have a feeling that very soon I will not be able to access the internet due to lack of electricity.
Which basically means that in addition to not being able to goof off on BJ, I will also not be able to do any work.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
I continue to find myself utterly depressed at the state of politics and general public opinion in America these days. I mean…seriously, go onto a comments section on just about any major newspaper or news outlet, from the NYTimes, to the WaPo, to Guardian, to even the more abashedly right wing nutteries. Then look at the discourse in general. From Climate Change to economics to plain politics in general, the ‘accepted’ narratives and lines from the majority seem to echo perfectly with your standard right wing troll, and it’s getting nowhere better, and it seems totally utterly fucking impenetrable. We are literally run by trolls, because our leaders seem to go out of their way to listen to no one else but people who, if they were online, would simply be Poe’s Law-invoking trolls.
I seriously just want to tear my hair out when I get into things about Global Warming, and comments end up with trolls on about ‘REAL LIFE IS COMPLEX, THE MODELS LIE!!!’, and….we end up with the fucking EPA gutted, fracking galore, and stupidity about how ‘we can’t take a chance on green energy, it costs too much and it doesn’t make enough anyhow!’ Especially when people were screeching about investing in non-fossil fuel energy for decades so we could actually have the tech to make it viable NOW. But oh no, the Trolls say ‘ALL GUBMENT SPENDING IS EVILLLLLL!!!’ and thus the only investments we make are on how to totally fuck over the working class while giving multinationals billions in tax rebates because ‘that’s how you make jobs’.
Fuck this whole fucking country.
Virginia Highlander
@piratedan:
Indeed, but devil his due, this is how we began in Vietnam, isn’t it?
I don’t think one can reasonably deny the slippery slope we’re standing on. The fallacy comes in automatically assuming we will slide down it.
Failure, Inc.
@Joe Beese: Go ahead and knock yourself out with every new outrage. Here’s a brutal truth about America in the year 2011.
No one gives a shit.
Amir_Khalid
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in Cannes to launch his TV cartoon show “The Governator”. Per the Grauniad:
This may say something about how politicians see themselves, but I’m not quite sure what.
jeffreyw
breakfast is served
Julia Grey
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I’ve had days like that.
I just have to hope that the press, in its constant pursuit of the Next New Thing, will eventually discover that they are bored to death with the right-wing worldview.
Plus, ANY political philosophy carried to extremes will eventually undermine/destroy itself, and the Republicans are well into their extremist phase now. How long it will take for the endgame to play out and how much damage will be done in the meantime is the question, not their eventual downfall.
Zifnab
@Virginia Highlander:
This is how we begin any military engagement. We were arming and training Iranians and Nicaraguan Contras and Afghanistan rebels and Eastern European dissidents and Columbian paramilitaries all through the 70s and 80s. Not every military engagement is Vietnam.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be wary. Just that this isn’t a huge deviation from the script.
piratedan
@Virginia Highlander: true, also see Afghanistan, yet each is different and unique. Vietnam was to clean up after the French and Afghanistan to spitball the Soviets, both were Cold War extensions by proxy. Who is backing Qaddafi?
Not saying that there couldn’t be parallels to Iraq, because the power vacuum left behind could turn out to be filled by who knows what, what infrastructure is there? The hard part with replacing dictators is having to build/create all of those pieces of governance, from local rule all the way up to and including, who keeps the lights on. That’s the part where I think we screwed up in Iraq (imho) is that we didn’t put enough effort into rebuilding it as we went along (civil wars will kind of do that though, one helluva distraction) and the efforts that were made weren’t enough.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Julia Grey:
Unfortunately, it seems like the only time the media gets bored of the right-wing extreme mindset is when it becomes not extreme enough. All the while blissfully tarring anyone to the left of Evan Bayh as the Most Soshuliztic America Hating Hippie Evar.
I’m honestly convinced it never WILL end at this point. Peak Wingnut is a lie. Peak Sanity has already come, gone, and faded out the rear view mirror ages ago.
A Farmer
Ok, which Middle American state has the worst new GOP governor, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania?
Gin & Tonic
@A Farmer: Yes.
Virginia Highlander
@Zifnab: Agreed.
@piratedan:
Chavez, for starters, something I suspect is a misstep for his “Bolivarian Revolution”, or at least his leadership role therein. That he would back Gaddafi should not surprise anyone, at least in retrospect.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@A Farmer:
At this rate, the better question is ‘what states with sane state government do we have left?’.
Chris
@Zifnab:
I knew about everything except the Colombian paramilitaries. Did we help create the AUC? I wasn’t aware of that – I thought for once, it was an area of the world where we hated both sides of the conflict.
Also, were there violent groups in Eastern Europe that we supported? I have a hard time buying that, not because I don’t think we would’ve done it but because I thought the police states in Eastern Europe had been pretty good at stomping out any armed resistance (and most resistance period).
Paul in KY
@A Farmer: That’s a tough one. I’d have to say Wisconsin, with Ohio right behind.
Julia Grey
I can’t believe that, see, because I have children. I must have faith the the “arc of history.”
Besides, there are still sane people out there. We’re still here, right?
It occurs to me that for feeling helpless and hopeless, there must not have been anything more stunning and demoralizing to sane Germans than the rise of Hitler and the descent of the iron grip of the Reich. Yet even they, with all their apparently unstoppable power, didn’t last forever.
PaulW
There is no more Sullivan at The Atlantic blogging site.
McCardle is now atop the Voices list. :shudder:
This is unacceptable. We need to move Coates to the top of the list.
Everyone! Start posting more comments to TNC’s blogging! Hurry! We need 1 million hits before Tuesday!
Moonbatting Average
@A Farmer: All of them.
/Palin’d
PaulW
@A Farmer:
Florida.
I can trump you with a MEDICARE FRAUD every day of the week, bitches.
Joey Maloney
Tina Brown is on Diane Rehm talking about Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and just paused to give Andrew Sullivan a truly embarrassing tongue bath.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Julia Grey:
That doesn’t exactly give me much comfort. The idea that it’d take being on the losing side of a world war for us to correct ourselves is about the extreme opposite of comforting.
And yeah, we’re here. But we’re essentially voiceless too, even at our loudest. A hundred thousand of us simply don’t stand up to about 150 teabaggers as far as the public discourse goes.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
On a lighter note: there was a poetry contest in Britain’s prison system, and the person who won second prize was outed for plagiarism. He’d stolen a Philip Larkin poem. I don’t know what I love most about this story–the outrage from the other prisoners who outed him, the fact that the judge didn’t recognize the poem, or that Larkin came in second in the contest.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8423247/Inmates-seek-justice-for-Philip-Larkin-poem-that-won-second-place.html
Joe Beese
@Failure, Inc.:
True dat.
You Don't Say
Did anyone watch “The Killing” on AMC? Thoroughly enjoyed it myself. Good to see that woman from “Homicide.”
Liberal Sandlapper
Allison Kraus has the most beautiful voice in the world. That is all.
Paul in KY
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik: I was gonna mention something in that vein, but your response was pitch perfect.
cmorenc
@Julia Grey:
Some of the more calmly, cynically calculating right-wing politicians actually do understand that for a variety of reasons they’re at high risk of suffering electoral burnout within the foreseeable future. One of their main short-term goals over the next two to as long as six years (i.e. as long as they retain influence via the crop of winger politicians elected in 2010) is to inflict so much structural wreckage on the federal government, and erect as many difficult structural obstacles in the way of repairing it, that it won’t matter if they suffer becoming a 35% political minority for even a few decades to follow. They’re out to scorch the ground and salt the earth.
singfoom
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik: It’s a rough time for those of us that are sane. It’s hard to resist just throwing your hands up and saying “fuck it”. Just hang in there, and realize that there are other rational people left, and sometimes they even vote.
Encourage others to approach politics rationally instead of emotionally. In time hopefully it will change.
Personally, I’m waiting for a SCOTUS reversal on Citizens United, or some fucking thing to get rid of our system of legalized bribery.
Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but I can still hope.
piratedan
@PaulW: yeah but in Arizona, we have Cactus Barbie, who sees headless bodies in the desert, believes that while we can fund rest stops for weary interstate travelers through our state that people on the organ transplant list have to go without. She also has a fine grasp of mathematical nuance, by refusing to fund the state’s public health system so she then can be denied the two-thirds in federal matching funds for their care. The new budget that she will sign is a death knell for local health care as rural clinics will no longer be able to stay open AND she calls herself the education governor by whacking 454m from the educational budget, No one was spared, community colleges, big universities and K-12, all got hammered.
steve
Isn’t that the show where they have a guest speak, then they torture a tranquilized housecat for a few seconds, then the guest again, then back to the cat,…?
gene108
I really wish there liberal dirty f’in hippie billionaires, who would blindly fund media operations, like the right-wingers have done.
I don’t know, if you can be a billionaire and a liberal dirty f’in hippie at the same time. I think those modes of existence are incompatible, which maybe why there’s so little liberal media presence in this country and it has been totally swallowed by the right-wingers.
I think sometime in the 1990’s, the MSM decided all those right-wing publications, which started up in the 1980’s, like American Spectator and The Washington Times, were serious news organizations and started reprinting what they were writing.
America is still paying the price for the lack of attention the MSM paid, in the 1990’s, because that led to the election of Bush, Jr., who ran on a platform of “restoring honor the White House”. It worked because people were sick of the scandals swirling around the Clinton White House.
I think any MSM reporter, who seriously gave time to White Water as a major issue of the day, should have all their assets confiscated and used to pay down the debt, they helped create by enabling the Republicans way back when.
Right now, I think it’s too late, because the Right’s media presence is ubiquitous.
Xenos
Any reactions from the teapartisans in their motorized chairs about Paul Ryan’s attempt to take the government out of Medicare by ending the program entirely?
I can’t seem to find any one on the right who is happy or unhappy about this. Like the hundreds of thousands rallying for Wisconsin unions, it is just not newsworthy.
gene108
@Xenos:
He’s not taking away their Medicare. They get grandfathered into what they have. It’s the people 55 and under, who will get screwed, which is about right, since the 55 and under crowd isn’t a reliable voting block for Republicans.
Joe Beese
Profile in Courage:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20050405-503544.html
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@A Farmer: Well, so far PA isn’t trying to shut down local governments and sell them to the highest bidder. So I’ll vote for Michigan.
Of course, it gets a bit complicated in PA (Wikipedia):
polyorchnid octopunch
@Zifnab: @Just Some Fuckhead: Nope to both of ya… this is about the upcoming Canadian election. The Canadian right wing has gotten itself some dough to hire astroturfers.
trollhattan
@Liberal Sandlapper:
Hard to argue. The SACD edition of the Live album still gives me chills every time I listen.
trollhattan
@Amir_Khalid:
I suppose the true drama over getting home for dinner will generally revolve around the 500-mile daily flight to get there. Lord, how I don’t miss him.
Brachiator
@piratedan:
Actually, this doesn’t make sense for what is supposed to be a short term mission. If Libya’s army commanders cannot be “persuaded” to stand down or switch sides, there is not much hope for the rebels who don’t appear to be very organized at all.