This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion. Oh yes, I did forget something, didn't I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Anthony Fremont. He's six years old, with a cute little-boy face and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you'd better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge.
No doubt, military-industrial contractors, around the country, will spend the night attempting to summoning Anthony, from the Twilight Zone, pleading with him to wish Secretary of Defense Robert Gates into the cornfield.
Look at all the bad things he's saying, they'll tell Anthony.
Doesn't that make Anthony angry, they ask Anthony, in-between whispers to wish Gates into the cornfield.
Then, they'll down their second/third/fourth martini.
Robert Gates was in the house! Robert Gates ... In the mother-fucking house!
“Eisenhower was wary of seeing his beloved republic turn into a muscle-bound, garrison state—militarily strong, but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent,” Gates said.
Gates acknowledged that saving money in the defense budget “will mean overcoming steep institutional and political challenges, many lying outside the five walls of the Pentagon.”
Apart from making the case against the alternate engine for the F-35 and more C-17s, Gates raised the alarm over Congress’s resistance to increasing the premiums and co-pays on the military’s health insurance. The Pentagon has attempted in the last several years to make modest increases to the co-pays and premiums in order to bring the health care costs under control, Gates said.
“Leaving aside the sacred obligation we have to America’s wounded warriors, healthcare costs are eating the Defense Department alive, rising from $19 billion a decade ago to $50 billion—roughly the entire foreign affairs and assistance budget of the State Department,” Gates said.
In case tightening collars denied oxygen to their brains, and the contractors were gasping for air;
“Another category ripe for scrutiny should be overhead,” he said. “According to an estimate by the Defense Business Board, overhead, broadly defined, makes up roughly 40 percent of the Department’s budget.”
Gates said the Pentagon’s approach to coming up with the requirements for specific programs and contract must change. Requirements for weapons systems should be based on a “wider real world context,” he said.
And, not to be overlooked, Gates threw down against the Congress;
“For example, should we really be up in arms over a temporary projected shortfall of about 100 Navy and Marine strike fighters relative to the number of carrier wings, when America’s military possesses more than 3,200 tactical combat aircraft of all kinds?” Gates asked in a reference to the congressional push to buy more Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets.
“Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners? Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”
Here that Congress? Robert Gates is in the mother-fucking house!
I've been thinking about this for the last few months. It's good to see DefSec Gates address wasteful military spending. He takes on all the sacred cows inside the Pentagon including medical benefits and so-called overhead, but I think the big money is in unnecessary equipment.
The question, of course, is whether members of House and Senate -- Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals -- are prepared to recognize that real world context and operate within it.
The fact of the matter is that no discussion of cutting spending, balancing budgets and reducing deficits is serious if it does not include a discussion of how to cut Pentagon waste and abuse. The Secretary of Defense is ready for that discussion.
Hear that military-industrial contractors?
Hear that Congress?
And Anthony, you ain't got a cornfield big enough, cuz.... Robert Gates is in the mother-fucking house!
We have to agree with Michael Stickings, over on The Reaction(disclosure, this writer is a Contributing Editor there), that this, indeed, is the Photo of the Day!
New recruits of the Vatican's elite Swiss Guard march during the swearing in ceremony at Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. The Swiss Guard, founded in 1506 and consisting of 100 volunteers who must be Swiss, Catholic, single, at least 174 centimetres tall and beardless, celebrate their 502nd anniversary this year.
Fourteen percent of Americans say without prompting that they think Barack Obama was born in another country, rising to one in five when those with no opinion are offered that as a possibility. But for many it's not a firm belief and some appear not to hold it against him.
Among those inclined to think Obama was born abroad, half also say that's their suspicion only, not a judgment based on solid evidence, the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll finds. And perhaps surprisingly, about a third of so-called "birthers" nonetheless approve of Obama's work in office and express a favorable opinion of him personally.
[snip]
THE QUESTION – This ABC/Post poll posed the question neutrally; first: "On another subject, where was Barack Obama born, as far as you know?" Sixty-eight percent said the United States (or a location within the country), 14 percent said another country and 19 percent had no opinion.
No, I don't think that's the right explanation. The whole point of birtherism is that you can't possibly find out the truth because B. Hussein Osama is so EEEEEEEVIL!!! When anti-Obama birthers choose "suspicion only," they're not making an ambiguous statement about their beliefs; they're saying that the suppression of the truth is so great that history's greatest monsters would be jealous!
Of course, it's a ridiculous question anyway; what the hell "solid evidence" could there possibly be? But for some birthers the lack of solid evidence is solid evidence that B. Hussein is hiding ... something; others express this same feeling as a deeply held suspicion. It's just two different ways of describing the same invisible monsters under the bed.
It's over a year-and-a-half and these people ...
Oh, what's the use ...
Jesus Christ could come down, put his arm around Obama and vouch that he was born as, and remains, a United States citizen and the Birthers (aided, perhaps by a handful of Teabaggers) would boo and jeer the announcement.
Yep. Republicans and conservatives always get mad at polls that make them look bad, but they look bad because of what they believe and not because they were polled.
Why is this news, again?
Why is this poll being taken?
The story returned to the news when the Hawaii legislature last week approved a bill authorizing the state Health Department to ignore repeated requests for information on Obama's birth records. The department's director had testified it was taking time and resources to respond "to these often convoluted inquiries." The bill's on the governor's desk.
This will be a Birther Meme by the beginning of the week.
For fans and scholars of the silent-film era, the search for a copy of the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has become a sort of holy grail. One of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, “Metropolis” had not been viewed at its full length — roughly two and a half hours — since shortly after its premiere in Berlin in 1927, when it was withdrawn from circulation and about an hour of its footage was amputated and presumed destroyed.
But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country. So an 80-year quest that ranged over three continents seems finally to be over, thanks in large part to the curiosity and perseverance of one man, an Argentine film archivist named Fernando Peña.
And why is this a big deal?
Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.
[snip]
That a copy of the original print of “Metropolis” even existed in Buenos Aires was the result of another piece of serendipity. An Argentine film distributor, Adolfo Wilson, happened to be in Berlin when the film had its premiere, liked what he saw so much that he immediately purchased rights, and returned to Argentina with the reels in his luggage.
For too long, all these decades, 'Metropolis' was thought to be a science fiction movie.
Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of the science fiction context to explore a political theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism.
The full-cut version now straightens that out;
The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”
When it comes out, and if 'Metropolis' is in a city near you, go check it out
Yet ...
While I have seen 'Metropolis' a few times, I was more partial, and liked better, Lang's "M", the riveting thriller, starring Peter Lorre, that "has become a classic which Lang himself considered his finest work."
Instead of making a deal with ESPN, CBS decided it would be more profitable to share the tournament with Turner Sports and agreed last month to pay $10.8 billion from 2011 to 2024 under that arrangement.
CBS preferred that deal because it enabled the network to maintain its connection to the tournament while carrying fewer games and mitigating the huge losses it was forecasting over the final few years of its previous contract.
Turner’s games will be on TBS, TNT and truTV, and starting in 2016, CBS and TBS will alternate the Final Four and the national championship game, a major coup for a cable network.
They could have, just as easily, been talking about Pork Futures.
With all that money being tossed around, television - and the schools - making millions-to-billions, the sad-sack chatter of kids bolting to the NBA for big bucks sound very, very hollow.
I wonder if this is in an schools' Finance curriculum?
a voluntarily observed holiday that commemorates the Mexican army's unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.[2][3] It is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla and in the United States.[4][5][6][7] While Cinco de Mayo has limited significance nationwide in Mexico, the date is observed in the United States and other locations around the world as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride.[8] Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico's Independence Day,[9] the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico.[10]
Oh, and such an especial Cinco de Mayo this year, with the backdrop of the budding fascism in Arizona.
Myers: This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying "Show me your papers?" There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line "show me your papers." It’s their catchphrase. Every time someone says "show me your papers," Hitler’s family gets a residual check. So heads up, Arizona; that’s fascism. I know, I know, it’s a dry fascism, but it’s still fascism.
So, for Cinco de Mayo, we go with a tune, while not definitively Mexican, and we, fairly recently posted it, it is in the spirit of the day, sure to get your toes tappin' WEATHER REPORT brown street 1979
What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?
With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?
How's them apples for an opener?
Cohen quickly elucidates;
Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”
Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.
"Vile beyond all vileness ..."
I don't know if you can even begin comprehending, processing such a magnitude of evil.
The book is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo until the couple’s capture in October 1942 and subsequent beheading. Fallada, a sometime morphine addict who lived in and out of asylums, got hold of the Hampel police files through a friend in late 1945, wrote a journalistic account that year, and then, in a burst of creativity, the novel.
[snip]
The book pulses with the street life of a terrorized city, full of sleaze, suspicion, drunkenness, desperation and murder. It proclaims the bestial sadism of which man is capable and the enormous moral stature of decency. It has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”
If Primo Levi told me to crawl underneath the Brooklyn bridge, naked, and read the graffiti there -- if he were here to suggest that -- I’d be swinging over the side of that bridge right now, even though it’s 30 degrees and the middle of rush hour.
[snip]
So when I heard that Primo Levi had declared Hans Fallada’s long-obscure Every Man Dies Alone to be “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” I tucked into its 500 pages with a feeling of razor-sharp glee mixed with dread, worried and hopeful that it would make me unable to live in the same way anymore.
[snip]
Himmler planned on the Holocaust being an “unwritten page of glory.” Every unearthed manuscript or reprinted book like Every Man Dies Alone defeats that plan.
Indeed, for the film that made her a star when she was just 23, “Georgy Girl” (1966), she said she put on 14 pounds to play the title role: a previous generation’s Bridget Jones, a pudgy, gawky young woman whose painfully uncertain self-image leads her to sublimate her own desires to those of her acquaintances. She was nominated for an Academy Award.
Lynn Redgrave, an introspective and independent player in her family's acting dynasty who became a 1960s sensation as the freethinking title character of "Georgy Girl" and later dramatized her troubled past in such one-woman stage performances "Shakespeare for My Father" and "Nightingale," has died. She was 67.
Her publicist Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her children, said Redgrave died Sunday night at her Manhattan apartment. In 2003, Redgrave had been treated for breast cancer.
Her death comes a year after her niece Natasha Richardson died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident and just a month after the death of her older brother, Corin Redgrave.
We got a "Covergirl" email today, from the Flying Monkey perch at Human Events, heart-clutching, and breathlessly throwing rose pedals on the Queen of the Flying Monkeys, Michelle "Stalkin'" Malkin, for being "covergirl" of this month's other Flying Monkey perch, Townhall;
Michelle Malkin has been making a killing doing what she does best: exposing the corruption and lunacy of America's liberals. And the Left can't stop her.
Most people know her as a conservative firebrand who has written best-selling books, including "Culture of Corruption," which dealt with the shady characters that have populated the Obama administration, and "Unhinged," which exposed the lunacy of the Left.
That passage alone should tell the reader this book is not a trustworthy work of history but a polemic--The O'Reilly Factor masquerading as the History Channel.
[snip]
But Malkin does not so much as mention any of that evidence, except to say that a reader can find it elsewhere in "pedantic tomes" and "educational propaganda." She dismisses what she cannot rebut.
These objections to Malkin's handling of the evidence are the concerns of scholars and historians, and some may think them unfair measures for the work of a political columnist. "I am neither a historian nor a lawyer," Malkin reminds her reader in the book's prefatory note. But even political columnists are bound by ordinary rules of inference and logic, and it is on this score that her book fails even more spectacularly.
The book proved to be highly controversial when published, with Asian-American groups in particular being highly critical. John Tateishi, the Executive Director of the Japanese American Citizens League issued a media release on August 24, 2004 stating "Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror is a desperate attempt to impugn the loyalty of Japanese Americans during World War II to justify harsher governmental policies today in the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans."
The organization Historians' Committee for Fairness condemned the book as "a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness".[6]
We'll make her The Garlic's "Cover Flying Monkey of the Day", with some of our highlights;
A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than 1 miles away.
Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.
“The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.
“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”
The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.
The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.
Holy Bullseye Batman! Give this man a Kewpie Doll!
A friendly-looking, white-haired older gentlemen, speaking in a tone, that of a grizzled, wise-to-the-bone, Midwestern small town doctor, a bit self-effacing, before laying on the con ...
Truth seekers the nation over, therefore, are indebted to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who in recent days uncovered what he called a government-enabled “TARP money shuffle.” It relates to General Motors, which on April 21 paid the balance of its $6.7 billion loan under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
G.M. trumpeted its escape from the program as evidence that it had turned the corner in its operations. “G.M. is able to repay the taxpayers in full, with interest, ahead of schedule, because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse,” boasted Edward E. Whitacre Jr., its chief executive.
[snip]
Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.
[snip]
Mr. Grassley heard back from the Treasury last Tuesday. Herbert M. Allison Jr., assistant secretary for financial stability, confirmed that the money G.M. used to repay its bailout loan had come from a taxpayer-financed escrow account held for the automaker at the Treasury.
What a difference a year makes. Just about a year ago, the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse. Today, General Motors announced that it has repaid its $6.7 billion loan to the U.S. government in full five years ahead of schedule, and Chrysler announced that, after taking one-time charges last year associated with its restructuring, it produced an operating profit in the first quarter of 2010 for the first time since the economic crisis began. The prospect of a faster than anticipated exit from government involvement and a return of most of the taxpayers’ investment in these companies has materially improved.
This turnaround wasn’t an accident of history. It was the result of considered and politically difficult decisions made by President Obama to provide GM and Chrysler – and indeed the auto industry – a lifeline, if they could demonstrate the will to reshape their businesses and chart a path toward long-term viability without ongoing government assistance.
Holy Long Con, Batman!
Even Bernie Madoff, sitting in his prison cell, had to give himself a few headslaps after reading this today.
He was in the wrong racket.
If he only hooked into the Government money pipeline ...
He had to be thinking about General Motors, taking over the Myra Langtry role in 'The Grifters' with the Government playing Roy Dillon;
Roy Dillon: Maybe I like it where I am.
Myra Langtry: Well, maybe I don't! I had ten good years with Cole, and I want them back! I gotta have a partner! I looked and I looked and believe me, brother, I kissed a lot of fucking frogs, and you're my prince!
But, Gretchen spanked'em all;
Of course, there is much joy in Mudville when a recipient of government aid repays its obligations. And it is also natural that the administration is keenly interested in reassuring taxpayers that losses on their bailout billions will be smaller than expected. Still, employing spin and selective disclosure is no way to raise taxpayers’ trust in our nation’s leadership.
