Month: November 2004

A Tackhead Moment

Long, long ago I first heard the song “What’s my mission now? Fight the Devil!” by Gary Clail’s Tackhead Sound System. It was written in the 1980s but it seems to get more relevant every day.

There’s an extended sample in that song of a guy talking, some military brass describing an interview with some political types:

We can’t do this, and we can’t do that, and we can’t do that, and finally one of them stood up and said, “Well, what the hell CAN you do?”

The answer to that is, “Well, we can kill people and destroy things in the name of the United States.” [laughter] My God, you can’t say that. But that’s what we do! [more laughter] And if you don’t want that done, don’t send in the military.

Don’t send in the military and say, ‘Oh, my God, you hurt someone!” Of course we did. That’s what you sent us there to do.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century…

( MSNBC: ) Two units that were not involved in Friday’s fighting advanced on the mosque, one moving around the back and the second, accompanied by Sites, from the front. Sites said he could hear gunfire from inside.

Sites was present when a lieutenant from one of the units asked a Marine what had happened inside the mosque. The Marine replied that there were people inside.

“Did you shoot them?� the lieutenant asked.

“Roger that, sir,� the second Marine replied.

“Were they armed?� the lieutenant asked.

The second Marine shrugged in reply.

Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.

One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f—ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f—ing dead.â€? Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

“Well, he’s dead now,� another Marine said.

When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: “I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.�

That’s what we do. And if you don’t want that done, don’t send in the military.

Finance a Recount in Ohio

The Green and Libertarian parties are stepping up to the plate where the Dems and Kerry wussed out: they are demanding a recount in Ohio because of the massive irregularities at the polls. Donate so they can afford it. This really freaking matters.

If they couldn’t afford the recount, would you want it to be because you didn’t send in your $20? your $10? your $5?

Got a sawbuck for the future of American democracy? What’s it worth to you?

(The link above is for the Green Party; I got it through electoral-vote.com. If you’re not into financing Greens in general don’t worry; you can specify that your donation is to finance an Ohio recount specifically. If anyone has a similar link for the Libertarians I would be thrilled to post it.)

UPDATE: of course, I forgot to note — Nader is pushing for this bigtime too. And wouldn’t it be some delicious irony if they got the recount, confirmed a Kerry victory, and it turned out that Nader was instrumental in giving the Dems the victory this year instead of costing them one?

Integrity and refusal to compromise are a double edged sword.

UPDATE: You can contribute to finance an Ohio recount through Badnarik as well.

First News Item In Weeks To Cheer Me Up

I hope this is accurate.

Great quote:

Well, the battle in Fallujah began hitting the media hard in the week before the election, right on cue. Of course it was billed as the solution, the battle that – if you just keep Bush in office – will wipe out those insurgents and solve the problems over there. This was yet another obvious use of our nation’s troops by President Bush as if they were campaign volunteers rather than non-partisan volunteers to defend our nation.

But Fallujah, it turns out, seems to be even more than that. Fallujah, in effect, was the get away car for an election heist.

Best Summary Yet Of Election Anomalies

Via private email from Pferdzwackür, this paper gives the best summary yet of the reason this exit poll thing has to be looked into.

Basically it lays down the case that exit polls being this systematically flawed, on the face of it, is about a 1 in 250,000,000 longshot. It may be that the exit polls were that flawed for some reason, but in the absence of a complete demonstration of exactly how they were flawed and why (involving the complete release of their data), the notion that the election was stolen is actually the likeliest hypothesis, despite a lot of pooh-poohing by the media.

I’d quote more but I don’t feel like navigating my way around the annoying “copy and paste disabling” DRM mechanism in the PDF file, or typing it all out by hand. Stupid proprietary software.