Current nightmare: An alternative future history

In the final days of the last Republican Administration the President of the United States resigned from office. Those who'd been crying out for impeachment, who'd felt betrayed when Democrats in congress took that option off of the table prior to the 2006 elections actually began to cheer. Those liberals and moderates, there were not that many, who'd been playing the game a few steps ahead all along, realized that the board had been overturned and the pieces scattered.

President Dick Cheney's first act was to issue the longest list of pardons in the history of the office. On that list appeared the names of the CEOs of every company that had received no-bid contracts to do work in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On that list appeared the names of every CEO of every oil and energy producing company doing business in the United States. But most people never read that far down because at the top of the list was the name of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Most of the people on the list had not been charged with any crimes and neither had the former President. The pardons were blanket absolution of any and all offenses and were specifically worded to cover any acts committed in the previous eight years. Dick Cheney's name was not on this list. A President may not pardon himself. He'd received his amnesty from the hand of the previous President before moving into the Oval himself.

Not that it mattered. Three hours before his successor took the oath of office in Washington D.C., Dick Cheney, 44th President of the United States for only two days, stepped off of Air Force One in Dubai. His company, Haliburton, had moved its headquarters there three years before because of the city's proximity to their Persian Gulf clients, it's reverence for corporate culture and the absence of any extradition treaty between the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America.

Adventures in Addiction: The Java Journey

Having experienced the perversion of home-brewed espresso at a client's house one afternoon I became intrigued, not to say obsessed, with the idea of making espresso myself. Did a bunch of research at www. wholelattelove.com, which retails all the gear and has a vast archive of useful consumer reviews. They also have refurb units for sale as well as a decent return policy. Good thing.

The issue with my client's unit (the coffee maker) is that it uses pre-packaged pods of pre-ground coffee and they are made by Nestle. I determined that if I were going to spend significant scratch for enhanced caffein delivery I wanted to have some control over the process. My client loves the pod system, but the complete lack of control didn't appeal to me.

Somehow, proceeding from this premise, befuddled by too much research or perhaps in insufficiency of caffein, I was seduced into purchasing a refurbed "Super Automatic" coffee maker (Jura Cappresso E- 8). With one of these babies you put water in one side, coffee beans in the other and you get java out of the center. You have control over the grind (VERY limited control as it turned out) and limited control over how much coffee is used in a shot. Oh, and you can choose from anyone's selection of coffee beans.

Except that the internals of the machine are so intricate that they recommend that you not use a dark-oily roast and if you do they insist that you use the coarsest grind the machine will produce. In essence, if you want a punchy, flavorful bean they make you grind it on the wimpiest, wateriest setting.

The result was something that smelled like good coffee but had no character at all. Immediately post-swallow there was no memory of the experience left in your mouth.

So what's the point. I can go to Macdonalds if I want weak coffee and I could produce better brew than this machine with a $30 french press.

So I returned it.

Now I've got the cheapest semi-automatic machine Gaggia makes (Gaggia Coffee) and their cheapest grinder (MDF). This method is MUCH fussier. But being in control of the grind and the tamp-pressure provides complete control over the process and can produce a superior espresso whether you like your brew to be smooth jazz or speed-metal on broken glass.

More to follow.

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Hysteria

Hellen Thomas Smacked Down by Dana Perino

Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters.org:

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino gave conservatives and right-thinking Americans across the fruited plain an early Christmas present Friday by smacking down liberal antagonist and so-called "journalist" Helen Thomas.

In an exchange about when or if the President would begin bringing troops out of Iraq, Thomas reminded Perino that we are killing people in Iraq. To which Perino replied:

Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is a -- it is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room, and to suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.

This is the statement that Sheppard, and the commentors at NewsBusters.org are crowing about.

Let's take our self-rightousness off the boil just long enough to examine some facts.

1. No one would deny that innocents are dying in Iraq as a consequence of collateral damage or that innocents only die as a result of the actions of our enemies. So it is true that innocents are dying as a result of the American presence in Iraq. Many fewer, one assumes, than were dying under our bombs, artillery and infantry assaults during the shock-and-awe phase of the attack which so many watched and cheered like it was a football game.

Helen Thomas did not at any time suggest that Americans were intentionally killing innocents. Yet this seems to be the accusation with which Dana Perino, and Sheppard as well, were trying to slander her.

2. Though Thomas did not say it, Americans ARE murdering civilians in Iraq. It seems impossible that the Press Secretary could miss the charges against Blackwater, the murder proceedings against Marines and the murder and rape charges against a group of US soldiers currently under adjudication, but we've all long ago ceased to be amazed at the incompetence and stupidity of the minions of the Bush administration.

In fact innocents are dying at the hands of Americans in Iraq. This is the inevitable consequence of an opposed occupation and would be a matter of common sense for anyone but this party and it's apologists who have been consistently surprised by the foreseeable and evasive of responsibility for the consequences from 9/11 to Iraq to Katrina.

Perino's and Sheppard's sanctimonious outrage over Helen Thomas's question is entirely out of place and would be comical, or merely pathetic, if the subject were not so horrible and their servile, predictable partisanship were not so frightening.

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End Game

It is my narrow understanding that the end of the Roman Republic in which lay the seeds of the collapse of the Roman nation can be traced to one thing: Rome ceased to be a nation of laws. It was always possible for the powerful to bend the rules and indeed Roman government was designed to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and the powerful among its citizens. But the magic formula was discovered by Sulla. Julius Caesar failed to fully grasp it and Augustus exemplified and refined the principle: Leave no one in opposition with both courage and breath.

Rome was transformed from a Republic of laws equally applied to a tyranny of the wealthy, powerful and vicious.

2000 years on and the Congress of the greatest Republic on earth is about to forward contempt citations to the Department of Justice. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia is an appointee of Bush the Younger and it would be surprising to one and all if he displayed the integrity to either act upon the lawful orders of Congress or to resign his office. The Vice President has declared Himself exempt from any oversight because He says so. The President has just given himself sole power to confiscate the property of American citizens he deems to be retrograde to the progress of his greatest failure, the Iraqi government. (Sulla nailed the names of people who opposed him to the doors of the Senate and citizen who killed them could take their property.)

Let us propose hypothetically that a Democrat wins the presidential election next year. Also that Republicans are further repudiated in Congress for aiding and abetting this President's imperial behavior and bungling. Finally, let us entertain the premise that Bush consents to an orderly transfer of power as the law demands. (I state this last as an explicit assumption. Given the laws this administration has bent, broken, ignored or mangled in interpretation, Bush handing over his office in the tradition of the Republic is by no means a given.)

If all these conditions are met there is one thing that remains necessary for the further survival of our own Republic: Justice. The first act of a new President, his first utterance in defense of the constitution he will have just sworn to preserve and protect, should be the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and prosecute malfeasance and dereliction in office during the Bush Administration beginning with US Attorney for the District of Columbia for refusing to comply with a lawful citation for contempt, and spreading out from there.

The survival of our Republic depends upon it.

The Terrible Gift of Prophecy

After we learned that there were no WMD in Iraq and it was clear that the war there was weakening our efforts in Afghanistan I had a few conversations with conservatives who all told me, "just wait. In a couple of years it will all make sense. Democracy will have spread throughout the region, terrorists will have been starved of support and incentive and the genius of George Bush's Grand Plan will have become obvious to one and all. Just wait."

"Indeed," I replied then. "Just wait." My own predictions of where we'd find ourselves today were not very far off the mark regarding Iraq and Afghanistan and crippled military recruitment and the accelerating cost in blood and cash and honor.

( What I didn't foresee was that the cretins who authored our condition have so successfully escaped responsibility for it. They got themselves a second term as a reward for their bumbling and the nation is in the process of a serious, sober debate about whether or not we should consider for a second electing anyone to the same office from the party who gave us Cheney/Bush.)

Unfortunately I did not write my predictions down anywhere. So I can't point to them and say "SEE! I was right! The President IS a mental defective running the country on the advice of his imaginary friends!" My credibility as a seer hasn't gotten any polish and so I am unable to enjoy even the slim, bitter consolation of vindicated cynicism.

But my crystal ball has begun to glow once more and again and I am gifted with a vision. This time I'm not keeping it to myself. Remember: You read it here first.

It's June 25th, 2007 and we've just learned that Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, sees himself as a fourth branch of government. That he operates without the oversight of the executive or of the legislative branch. That he was the author of US policy on torture, penning a memo to that effect which the Sec State and Sec Def had no knowledge of.

Insiders have expressed that information goes into the office of the Vice President but not out. It has been claimed doggedly that the VP must under no circumstances be compelled to reveal who attends meetings with him and in fact White House and Vice Presidential visitor logs, public documents since the founding of the Republic, have been classified. It is none of our business who our leaders do the people's business with.

Tie this with the recent news that Haliburton is moving it's headquarters from the US to Dubai. Haliburton, the company that owes it's fantastic success to Cheney's efforts to privatize functions of US military operations when he was Sec Def, the company that made him it's CEO (as a reward?) afterwards, the company that has raked in millions from no-bid and classified contracts since 9/11, the company that holds "in trust" Cheney's stock portfolio until he returns to private life. Haliburton, a company who's operations now run like veins and arteries through the muscle of our national defense.

If you further understand that Dubai has no extradition treaty with the United States, this sudden corporate flight makes enormous sense.

If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, an open question given the ineptitude of the party, it is unlikely that Cheney's secret meetings will remain secret. If the roles were reversed it was the GOP returning to power after being marginalized, after having the Justice department used to hound democratic candidates and the electoral system compromised in an attempt to extinguish it's participation in the democratic operation of the nation, it is a virtual certainty that a GOP controlled congress and White House would take every opportunity to hold it's predecessors responsible for it's real and imagined failures and prosecute anyone they could find guilty of a crime.

At the very least they'd be subjected to a lengthy, miserable and expensive legal ordeal. Depositions, testimony under oath; who needs it?

I am predicting today that if a democrat wins the White House in the next election, Dick Cheney will be given an emeritus position at Haliburton and move to Dubai, out of the reach of whatever is left of American Justice.

And Bush? The kid will have to fend for himself.

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Another Candidate Self-Destructs

McCain: Rumsfeld Worst Sec Def In History

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Monday the war in Iraq has been mismanaged for years and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be remembered as one of the worst in history....


"I have been saying for 3 1/2 years that we would be in this sad situation and this critical situation we are in today," he said.

Sweet Bleeding JESUS.

Three and a half years ago the sorry bastard was preaching the virtues of George W. Bush and his cabinet if savants < irony >. Three and a half years ago he was extolling the leadership of the War President and the soundness of his policies. McCain never said a PEEP of his grave reservations about these people until the week after he'd helped to secure them another four years in the White House.

Mark my words: As of today McCain's campaign is dead.


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The World Ends With a Meow

Some might say the Search for Meaning is like the need for any other crutch. Nicotine or alcohol or romance fiction or situational comedy or cats: Harmless in small doses. Amusing. Perhaps personally fulfilling and not without theoretical benefit to society at large. But at some point along the continuum from diversion to compulsion it is all too easy to pass the point of diminishing returns. The transition is so faint and indistinct that it's hard to see even from the outside. Not even your friends may be able to tell when your collection of ABBA memorabilia became a destructive obsession or when you became an alcoholic. They will only notice after it's too late.

Much less may we expect to notice the transformation, the passage into no-man's land, for ourselves. From inside the beast.

One hint, an indication that our personal fixation has become unhealthy, may be evangelism. It is one thing to revere the whole-wheat tortilla as the Perfect Food. Quite another if we can't stop recommending our dietary regime to other people. It is an unfortunate characteristic of some religions that aggressive marketing is part of the sacred package. Is a dietary fanatic really so different from someone who bows before the putative portrait of Jesus in a tortilla? Both may simply have an addiction. Both may crave "Meaning" the way a supermodel craves cocaine and validation.

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