Men with guns at the Polls in Arizona

See this AZ Daily Star article for a kid-gloves treatment of what is happening here on the Southside, the side of Tucson where most people speak (gasp) Spanish. We would be doing pretty good if this were the only incident of voter intimidation around here, and we would be doing better if we had a way to prove that there was no cheating, particularly in the Diebold-infested "voting machines." Yes, they are voting machines, and they do mechanically cast a whole lot of votes, but do they cast your vote or do they just respond to somebody's keyboard punches? Ask the Dieblold higher-up, who told the whole fucking nation a couple years ago he'd do whatever it took to make sure Bush won.

I have seen men with guns at the polls before. The last time was when we supposedly elected Fuhrer Bush. I was coming home from work, having voted at 7 that morning. I was walking by my polling place, and there stood a man with a short hair cut, and an obvious firearm at his side. He was about 10 feet from the door of the polling place. The firearm was covered in a holster, but you could tell what it was and you could tell the guy was putting on a very good "cop" act, w/o the badge, to the disgrace of all true cops, who are there to help folks, serve the public. The guy looked at me like he wanted to kick my ass. I was just walking by. I thought he was going to follow me or something.

In the Daily Star article I link above, the reporter describes a man with a gun, who is named but not described. An accompanying man with a camera, and a known anti-Hispanic/anti-immigration person with the armed man are described.

Americans terrified by "Turd blossom" Rove

Who the hell needs Halloween when we've got BushCo?

Karl Rove, one of the main criminal psychopaths behind the Bush Administration, is portrayed as a Halloween bogey here in this UK Guardian article regarding our bleak political landscape.

Be it noted that nowhere does the Guardian article mention the even worse spectre of election fraud.

OK, this is insane

This story demonstrates not only the traditional disregard for the rights of schoolchildren, but also the popular current psychopathic alarmist pseudo threat-related behavior on the part of vague authoritarian military/police well-armed behind the scenes troops. Whoever was responsible for this should lose their jobs but will most likely be promoted instead.

Who is dispensing terror here? Our own government, home-grown crazies, or foreign crazies?

"Librarians gone wild."

This is what Melissa used to say when we were temps, and wondering if many of these folks ever got out for a drink- "It's librarians gone wild!!"

But Wow!

Here is something that will get the attention of all of those library information associates, library information analysts, library specialists, librarians, and lovely digital archivists.

It's some of the most lovely libraries in the world, and I mean lovely, together here in this book, in hot, slippery living color.

Seriously, the book is called "Libraries," photographs by Candida Höfer.

Nice work huh? It looks like all the libraries are in Europe, at least in the link to the "thenonist.com" blog I post above. However I know there are some dandy library architecture spaces here in the U.S. and certainly in good old Tucson. The Gould Simpson building's library is a small gem with a million dollar view. The old library in the AZ State Museum has the coolest reading room in the world, and probably some of the biggest windows you'll ever see. The Main Library on Campus has good mezzanines- unknown, cluttered behind poor interior decoration- I think they have a committee discussing, and discussing, and discussing, that- and a great courtyard in front of the entrance, which courtyard is of course full of disgusting smokers breathing their vaporized chemical shit in the general direction of the rest of us. Oh, also, the 2 stroke gas powered blowers all over the place a couple times a week too. The guys wielding them have ear and eye protection and masks, but naturally they blast our ears and fill the courtyard with pollution and dust during peak hours. Yes, I know, welcome to Arizona.

America getting sick of "Conservative" morons

This is a quote from a recent email to a friend out of state:

There's a governor's debate on the tube tonight. The repub. challenger started right off talking about family and that same code crap. I don't think those morons know that shit is getting old with the rest of us. I thing the radical right repressive minority makes up about 2% of us. Since they are repressive, they seek to cover up the dealings and the statements of the rest of us. That's what Bush gets for getting into bed with those fools, but it was perfect for them, and his neocon thinktanks approved it cuz it's another perfect subterfuge, ala Reagan. As scared as we are of neo-fascism, what we see is nothing but the impotent attempt of the same assholes from the Reagan age to fuck us over. Sooner or later, all of us will be about as serious about Bush as we were about Reagan.

Welcome to politics in Arizona. The conservative moron running for governor is behind a big anti-gay marriage deal here in Arizona. He started his intro statement to the debate with "I love everyone in Arizona." Well, unless you're gay, or unless you support gay people. That equals about 98% of the population around here. So the guy does not really love much of anybody, only those who go to his church or who do not like gay people. So the only way this guy can win an election is with the help of Diebold and their slimy vote manipulating computer hacks. Welcome to outsourcing in the post Reagan age. If they can't fuck over the people they're supposed to represent using our own government, then they'll hire an outside company to do, and pay them using your tax dollars. Brilliant. This is why we have business masterminds like Rumsfeld running important areas like defense. Way to go. Thanks.

Fear Greed and Infotainment vs. The Press

See this piece in the Arizona Daily Star, by a David Cuillier, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and current vice chairman of the national Society of Professional Journalists' Freedom of Information Committee.

Some details and comments about BushCo paying journalists to spread propaganda are mentioned. Also, some details about the Press' duty to speak out, and newspaper companies gradually sliding away from the press' function as a check on government and industry misdeeds.

I think what caught my eye about this op-ed piece is the tendency of some people to believe assertions that basically anyone who questions the current administration is somehow helping "the terrorists" or actually on the side of religious fundamentalists who wish to harm our country. Of course what shows such assertions to be utter bullshit is that there is no motivation for anyone questioning BushCo to side with destructive religious psychos from foreign nations. We have enough destructive religious psychos here, not quite as militant as the overseas version, calling themselves Christians, and doing a big insult to Christianity in the process, anyway. Anybody who's not a few bricks short of a load, for example those that are fed up with the lying and cheating of the Bush Administration, would never be on the same side as the morons of the ultraconservative religious right of any nationality.

But my point is that people can act like they believe whatever Cheney says, and whatever the so-called Conservatives have been saying since the Reagan days, when the Conservatives started wishing to get in control, and devote the government to serving large corporations and a handful of rich business leaders, rather than our own country, its own people, its environment and its infrastructure.

The writer of the article points to fear as motivation for folks to rally around something, anything, blindly. So no wonder the Vice President and other hired mouthpieces like O'Reilly, and, I guess, the President, keep having to dredge up new demons for people to fear. Outlining threat after threat, they keep picking more and more on people right here at home, usually their political opponents, often those of diverse social backgrounds who don't attend the correct church.

You can read the comments section of about any story in the Star, and see the few people whose duty is to hammer away at the actually very conservative paper, calling it again and again "The Red Star." Usually comments are tinted with xenophobia, racism, hatred, and form an amalgam of whatever kind of drivel you can hear well-paid conservative mouthpieces spout on just about any "news" show. You can't really call anything about that section of current events info "press." You can't really call it info because most of it is lies, the rest of it is twisted truth, and the overall function is to divide and conquer by covering up the truth, and to intimidate with the threat of playground-style name-calling into unquestioning silence.

Right wing slimeballs trying to influence election

So what else is new? Business as usual with the right wing religious nuts and power-mad robber barons trying to fuck over our country and every man woman and child in it.

Read about it here in the Huffiningtonpost blog.

Or watch it yourself. I wouldn't. I just think it's another example of why TV is bad. And I think this type of thing happens daily on the TV news.

A snip from the story:

"The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.