MONTOURSVILLE, Pa. (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday the invasion of Iraq will go down in history, along with the war in Afghanistan, for its ``brilliance.''

The vice president's comment came as he portrayed the controversy over hundreds of tons of missing explosives in Iraq as a battle pitting Sen. John Kerry against U.S. troops, with Cheney siding with the military.

At an airport rally at a hangar in Montoursville, Pa., Cheney said the U.S. invasions of ``Afghanistan and Iraq will be studied for years for their brilliance."

Here.

Yeah. Brilliant.

Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, too. Frickin' sharp. Smart.

How disconnected from reality is this administration?

...oh, and it gets better. Get this:

``Our troops were doing their job,'' Cheney said as he called Kerry an ``armchair general,'' a characterization the vice president has been using for several days.

Fightin' Dick Cheney, that damned draft-dodging chickenhawk, calls war-hero Kerry an "armchair general." Can you believe the audacity of this incompetent bungler?

He should have been impeached. Long ago. For the Energy Commission stuff if nothing else. Or the Plame smear. Or...

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

Josh has it here.

From what I understand, the oath does not include multiple recitations of, like, "Hail Bush" or anything like that. So don't worry!

Read this article by Kara Baskin on the Zombies.

The band, that is. Not undead monsters.

80,000100,000 turn out for Big John and Bruuuuuuuuuuce.

Chin up, people.

I've added Google advertising on the leftright. If you click one of those links, I believe that I receive as much as seven-hundredths of a cent. So make me rich, bitches.

This is our asshole president. When he was governor of Texas, he flips the bird to the camera. What a joker.

The video is here. [And here.]

I've stolen, from Bob Harris via Atrios, the following animated gif, which has been culled from the video. What a prick:



Go Kerry.

Blogger has been sketched out for, like, 24 hours. Dammit. This is not a good time.

Freakin' hobbits actually existed. Whoa baby.

This is our president.

Iraqi authorities assert that the [380 tons of missing high-powered explosives] was stolen after Baghdad fell, amid the widespread lawlessness and chaos that prevailed as U.S. forces struggled to reassert order. The Pentagon says it's possible the explosives went missing before the war, but they're not sure. It's unlikely they'll have it all cleared up in the next week.

What is clear is that Bush and his advisers decided that staying above the fray and ignoring Kerry's attacks wasn't working.

As of yesterday, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in The Washington Post: "Bush remained determined not to respond to the Democratic charge. Asked by a reporter about who was responsible for the missing munitions, Bush, on a visit to a dairy barn in Viola, Wis., simply glared, journalists with him said. . . .

Are you kidding me?

Well, no, not really. But they might as well have, according to what Josh is reporting.

36 newspapers that endorsed Bush in 2000 have now either endorsed Big John or refused to endorse this year. Howie reports:

The [Orlando] Sentinel is among 36 newspapers that endorsed President Bush four years ago and have flip-flopped, to coin a phrase, into Kerry's corner. These include the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, according to industry magazine Editor & Publisher. Bush has won over only six papers that backed Al Gore, including the Denver Post, which received 700 letters -- all of them protesting the move.

Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers -- the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them -- threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement.

"We have decided not to add one more potentially polarizing voice to a poisoned debate," the Plain Dealer editorial said. Amid reports that Publisher Alex Machaskee, who chairs the editorial board, wanted to back Bush, the Ohio paper acknowledged that a majority of the board favored Kerry.

Even many editorial page editors say they do not believe their endorsements move many voters in an age of round-the-clock opinion-slinging on television and online. But the Bush defections may reflect a degree of disillusionment with the president, at least among opinion leaders, principally on Iraq but on domestic issues, as well.

People are starting to pay attention to the election.

Seriously. Even lil' ol' Salto, this backwater corner of boonie Blogiana, is experiencing record traffic.

Watch poll numbers carefully in key states. Ignore the national numbers, as they are -- how do you say it? Absolutely irrelevant?

Jeez. Stunning.



...I really love and admire John Peel. What a force for good music.

This was the first Peel item I owned, circa 1993 or 1994:



But I might have heard a Breeders Peel Session via Andrew Rieth my freshman year of college before I actually owned that. Andrew, baby! Miss you!

RIP John Peel. Seriously.

It's deeply disturbing that I just got a google hit for the following search:

nude pictures lou dobbs

Yes. It's true. If you click on that link, Salto comes up #1.

This is CNN's Lou Dobbs, for those who don't know:


He may be an attractive older man (or whatever), but the question remains: who the hell is searching for nude pictures of Lou Dobbs? A lonely widower with cable TV and lots of investments? Unbelievable.

(By the way, and speaking of Google: a quarter of Salto's traffic comes from Googlers hitting this post. Sigh.)

...and three searches today for yul bryner within an hour. But never seen before. Google is mysterious.

...also, because of monkey.org, my host, any search combination of "monkey" with "bush" tends to get me. Try it.

Chin up, people.

[Via Kos]

I never really "got" the whole Lyndon LaRouche cult. After reading this (excellent) article, I definitely still don't "get" it, but at least my belief is confirmed that they're goddamnned loonies.

...whoa:

LaRouche maintained that the convictions were engineered to silence him politically and set him up to be murdered in prison. He survived. One of his cellmates was disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, who later described LaRouche as amusing, erudite and convinced their cell was bugged. "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid," Bakker wrote in his autobiography, "would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."

Oh dear me.

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

...

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

Read it all.

Yeah, we're like eight days away. I feel like I'm gonna shit myself. Must remember to find some valiums or some such before next Tuesday.

A couple of different music media joints reported this week that Jandek, the most mysterious man in rock (check this and this), played an actual live show last weekend in Scotland.

Here's the original story from the (Glasgow?) Sunday Herald by story's breaker.

Last weekend’s world-beating line-up saw performers drawn from the margins of genres such as jazz, improvisation, folk and rock, with saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe welding Noh theatre, Fluxus art-action and wild free-jazz blurt during a staggering solo set, and the avant-rock group Vajra – featuring Japanese underground veterans Keiji Haino and Kan Mikami – working two guitars and a set of drums into what sounded like the end credits on the story of your life. But it was an unannounced performance by one of the most revered and reclusive outsider artists of the past three decades that really set the whole event on fire.

The man known only as Jandek, a Texan singer-songwriter who plays internally explosive blues and wails with a voice that’s as void and haunted as Robert Johnson, has never before appeared in public. Indeed, only one journalist has ever even met him, and in his absence a cult of rumours has sprung up, spawning a speculative mini-industry that reached its apo theosis last year with the release of the film Jandek On Corwood, a documentary in which Jandek himself never actually appears. The emotionally wounded nature of his lyrics and his idiosyncratic, self-taught guitar style have led commentators to speculate that his many privately-pressed rec ordings were actually part of a long-term recovery programme, or perhaps a form of self-therapy. Whatever the story, his back catalogue remains one of the most personally revelatory and deeply human bodies of work of any artist of the modern era.

As soon as he walks on stage at The Arches, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat, black shirt and smart grey/black slacks, it’s clear that he’s the same person as has appeared on most of his cryptic record sleeves, only now older and a little more emaciated, with a glassy stare that could penetrate concrete. For his backing band he has recruited a pair of local musicians, with revered folk spirit Richard Youngs standing in on bass and Scatter percussionist Alex Neilson on drums. With the accumulated weight of a lifetime of myth and rumour hanging over the performance the stakes were perilously high, but the group more than rose to the challenge, navigating the weight of Jandek’s free blues with pulsing, Can-styled bass parts and locomotive percussion. Jandek himself moved through skeletal slow-motion postures, digging deep into his guitar and resurfacing with barbed, overtone-heavy drones and slicing chords that punctuated his black-snake moan. Although he never spoke, at several points he actually cracked a smile, raising hopes that this might not be the only performance of his career.

For Jandek-watchers worldwide, this is all simply earth-shattering news.

If you're not familiar with Jandek's oeuvre, perhaps you should hop on to your file-share method of choice and download some songs. They're very accessible.

Here.

Q. What is the etiquette of turning off a tv in a public place?

A. TV-B-Gone(TM) universal remote control is capable of turning off virtually any remotely controlled tv. Since a tv that is powered on fills the room with its sights and sounds, impinging on everyone in the room, it is similar to a smoker who fills a room with smoke. Some people may like breathing in someone else's smoke, but that's not for everyone. Similarly, not everyone wants to be disturbed with someone else's media. If someone were smoking a cigar in a public place and you were disturbed by it, you would probably either leave, or you would ask them if they would mind putting it out. Similarly, if someone is filling your space with disturbing sights and sounds of a tv, you have the same choices. With TV-B-Gone(TM) universal remote control, you also have the power to turn the tv off with others' approval.

I approve. Might be fun at, like, the Sony Metreon. Somebody get one.

Sorry for the lack of new stuff. I had to fill my hump with hate at the Oasis of Outrage. I'm back now.

I just don't know anymore.

Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush rally at the Jackson County Fairgrounds Thursday night, after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties."

Here.

...their shirts were called "obscene." Seriously. Lookit:



Yeah. Obscene.

[via Digby]