Around the Internets

I probably should split these up, but I'm a little tired and since I don't feel like taking the effort, oh well. I capped off the day by having to give an ass shampoo to Gracie, which somehow seems fitting.

71,000 job cuts were announced today. 209,000 have been announced so far for the year.

Last night, on 60 Minutes, was a look at what happens to a town when the largest employer goes Tango Uniform. In this case, the employer was DHL. You can bet that the upper management is still living well.


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Rep. John Conyers is going after Karl Rove to force him to testify under oath about the firings of US attorneys for refusing to initiate investigations of Bush's perceived political enemies.

Gonzo thinks he won't be prosecuted for signing off on torturing people. I suspect he is smoking crack. If an investigation trends his way, he would be a fool to hope that the Obama Administration would step in to quash it. My advice to him is the same advice that Rudyard Kipling gave to wounded Redcoats in Afghanistan.

Sticking with TPM, what the frak is up with this? Why is this Congress shafting spending money on improving mass transit? Given where gas prices were last summer and where they will go again when the world's economy recovers, what sort of shit-for-brains does it take to not invest in mass transit now?

Finally, Fixer on the closing of GITMO, the neocon's campaign of promoting tyranny based on fear, and how it shows how little the neocons think of the American people:

It's insane we're even having the conversation. We are the most powerful nation on Earth and it makes us look like a buncha cowards we are so terrified of a couple hundred people. For all the tough talk, we act like a nation of pantywaists.

Well, yeah. Crimus, we kill people from aircraft controlled by operators sitting half-way around the world at some hole-in-the-wall Air Farce Base in Nevada. We think that is righteous, but let some jihadist strap a bunch of C-4 to his body and sally forth to kill people and fucktards in this country think that is cowardly? The suicide bomber is dying for what he believes, while the Predator operator's biggest risk on the job is either getting a paper cut from the manuals at the Nintendo station where they fly the thing from or getting into a traffic accident during his commute.

I don't have a view of war as an honorable thing by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something that is downright cowardly about squeezing a trigger on a joystick at a remote-control station in Nevada and killing a bunch of people on the other side of the planet. And I'll bet that the fucking Air Force even gives them medals for that.