The Official Portrait

Fox, meet henhouse

Despite Concerns, Pentagon Seeks Civilian Firm to Oversee Contractors

Shortly after an inspector general questioned the practice of the Pentagon issuing contracts to administer contracts, the U.S. Army began advertising this week for an American firm to manage oversight of private security companies in Afghanistan.
[...]
The Pentagon's inspector general reported last month that the Defense Department was increasingly relying on contractors "to fill the gap from the reduced acquisition and oversight workforce, bordering on inherently governmental functions, thereby potentially taking on decision-making roles."

One such contract was put out for bid Monday by the Joint Contracting Center in Bagram, Afghanistan, which wants an American company to establish and run the Armed Contractor Oversight Directorate "in support of the Combined Joint Task Forces' contractor management initiative." That directorate would be "responsible for administering oversight, policy and reviewing procedures in all matters" concerning private security companies in the region, according to the proposal.

Hiring a private contractor to oversee private contractors ... what could possibly go wrong with that!?



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Oh the weather outside is frightful

It's 28 degrees, snowing/freezing rain, and has been like that for what seems forever. I've got a nasty cold, my GF broke up with me, I'm running short of provisions and I need a break!

One break, coming up!

Ladies & gentlemen, the Smothers Brothers rendition of Poor Wandering One:



Notice the Guild D-55, played by the first guitar player to ever have one: Tommy Smothers.

Which was just a smooooth segue into being able to casually mention I just bought a 1974 D-40!
It's still cold and crappy out, but at least now I have something with great curves that's warm and responsive to keep me happy at night. (Less maintenance too;-)

What, Me Hope?

There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief

(Mr. Hendrix-All Along The Watchtower)

Many liberal bloggers have gone "WTF?" over the selection of Rick Warren to pray at the Obama inauguration ceremony:

Dr. Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” will deliver the invocation.

It's not all bad news, however:

Aretha Franklin and Dr. Rick Warren, an evangelical minister of the Saddleback Church, are among the select group of people who will participate in Barack Obama’s inaugural swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20.

Mr. Obama has also chosen Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American poet at Yale University, and some of the world’s premier musicians, including Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, to share the podium with him.

In honoring the civil rights movement, Mr. Obama has asked the Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, dean of the civil rights movement and co-founder with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to deliver the benediction.

That's a fairly diverse group. The musicians are African-American, Israeli-born American, and Chinese-American. And contra Warren, Dr. Lowery understands something about discrimination.

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets wrote a well-considered critique of the Warren invitation. Please read the whole thing, not just the few words I copied and pasted here:

My tingling pastor-sense tells me that he selected Warren because he likes him and feels comfortable with him on a personal level. That's not as much of a stretch as it might seem; Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC are both much more evangelical than the rest of the UCC. Warren probably resonates with Obama in ways that somebody like myself never could.

. . . Nobody likes Warren. The Religious Right think he's a flake because he's too liberal, and everybody else thinks he's a flake because he's a shallow idiot. From where I'm sitting, as the victim of an extremely expensive and extremely rigorous theological education, Obama could have gotten a better invocation from Stuart Smalley. It would have as much depth, and at least it would be doing a Democrat a favor.

I have a couple of thoughts on this, and yes, I may be naive.

First, as many have suggested, this may be a genuine attempt to try and attract the reasonable younger evangelicals that are slowly splintering from the base movement of Falwell and Robertson. I think that will have extremely limited success, because for many of those folks, everything starts and ends with Choice v. Abortion. If Charles Manson ran for President, and claimed to be Pro-Choice™, they would vote for him.

Second, Warren will deliver a generic invocation. Obama will likely make some very inclusive statements during his speech, and may even mention gays and/or the LGBT community. If he does this, he pwns Warren, puts him in a box. In a way, it reduces Warren and his bigotry to the role of "the hired help". It's saying "we'll let you come to the dinner, but you still have to sit at the little kid's table".

Third, it may even be a more confrontational calculus: "OK, big shot, you want to be the Next Big Thing™ in evangelical Christiandom, and you want an audience, come speak at my Prom. I'll invite you, but many here among us don't like what you're selling".

Or Pastor Dan could be right in the end:

Mainline Protestant pastors are opinion leaders in their communities, and they tend to appreciate their GLBT friends and not appreciate slick weasels like Rick Warren. I was hardly the only pastor to support Obama, or to stick up for his vision of hope and reconciliation. Obama just spat in our eyes, and it's going to take a while to get over it.

Here's the thing about Warren. The main evangelical movers of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, in terms of TV exposure, were indeed Falwell & Robertson. Clearly they wanted political power. However, the evangelical leaders who were doing the work of 'saving souls' were, among a few others, Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel and John Wimber of the Vinyard. The main difference between the last two names and the first two were that CC and VCF sprouted many franchises, small churches all over the country, in their attempt to bring people to Jesus and salvation.

CC & VCF annointed many new pastors, and sent them out to preach and save people. Other '70s and '80s churches, like Kenneth Copeland in TX, built empires based on a single personality. Joel Osteen in TX has done the same recently. No real attempt at spreading their message to reach more people than the basic, albeit large, congregation.

Warren is the contemporary result of Copeland, and Osteen. He has built a huge campus, spent $$$'s in state-of-the-art audio & video equipment, and packs thousands into several services every Sunday. But he hasn't spread his ministry into franchises. It's all Warren, all the time. His message, his book, his ministry.

And he seems to love his power, even as he clearly favored McCain during Saddleback Church's Candidates debate forum. And Obama may actually like the guy, as many have suggested. But I don't think many on the far-evangelical right will take to Obama, and many of those same folks will see Warren as craven and manipulated.

I hope so. Still, he's a bigoted lying hate-monger.

Bastard.

So, if you had a chance ...

... of finding love or a certainty of making money, what would you do?

Blue Swayed Shoes [sic]

Iraqi reporter throws shoes at Bush, calls him dog

An Iraqi reporter called visiting U.S. President George W. Bush a "dog" in Arabic on Sunday and threw his shoes at him during a news conference in Baghdad.

Iraqi security officers and U.S. secret service agents leapt at the man and dragged him struggling and screaming out of the room where Bush was giving a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
[...]
When asked about the incident shortly after, Bush made light of it. "I didn't feel the least threatened by it," he said.

Other Iraqi journalists apologised on behalf of their colleague, a television journalist.

Of course he didn't feel threatened, his translator said he called him 'Dawg!'

Oh, and BTW, the "Other Iraqi journalists apologised on behalf of their colleague" statement? Yeah, not so much:

Iraq rally for Bush shoe attacker

Thousands of Iraqis have demanded the release of a local TV reporter who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush at a Baghdad news conference.

Crowds gathered in Baghdad's Sadr City district, calling for "hero" Muntadar al-Zaidi to be freed from custody.

I bet all the sole-less folks on the reichwing will have their tongues flapping about this heel.

Gee, if only there was some artist (cough, DarkBlack, cough) who could come up with a graphic for this post!



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

edit: You should have a doctor look at that cough, Sailor

;>)

db

Working hard or hardly working?

After Rescue, Bonuses Still Flow At AIG

Insurance giant AIG was given $152 billion in bailout money by the federal government since nearly collapsing in September. Now the company is planning to take millions of that money and hand it over to employees in a program that sounds a lot like bonuses.

AIG's new CEO is only taking a single dollar for his compensation this year and the top 60 executives won't be getting bonuses. But that hasn't stopped AIG from finding a creative way to keep some of their top employees in what they're calling "retention payments,"

Umm, when even lawyers and bankers are filing for unemployment, why do these executives need a 'bonus' to keep working? One would think just keeping the paycheck would be enough incentive.

In related news: The rethuglicans in the Senate trashed the auto bailout when Dems wouldn't give in to their demand that people making $28 per hour take a pay cut. When was the last time congress voted themselves a pay cut? [hint: NEVER!]

I did good work and good works this year and I make less than 10% of their salaries and less than 1% of Wall Street execs. I'm not getting a bonus this year and I'm not getting a raise this year and I didn't get $152 BILLION to bail out a predictably failed business model ... but I count myself lucky I still have a job.

Now excuse me while I comfort myself with bread and circuses (AKA the NFL.)


Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

He’s gotta make a living, he’s a Louisiana Man

After the political debacle that was the asshat Republicans voting to punish hard-working American auto workers, I felt like some good American folk music would be in order:



Doug Kershaw started singing with his brother Rusty, in the mid '50s. If like me, you were largely ignorant of Cajun music in the '60s, Doug's appearance on the seminal Johnny Cash Show in 1969 knocked you on your ass. And check out the great photos in the YouTube above.

From Wikipedia:

Born Douglas James Kershaw in Tiel Ridge, Cameron Parish, in an area known as Cajun country, he traces his ancestry to Acadians who were part of the Great Expulsion by the British authorities from their homeland in eastern Canada in 1755. He grew up surrounded by Cajun fiddle and accordion music, and as a 19-year-old, in 1955, he performed with his brother Rusty Kershaw on the Louisiana Hayride radio broadcast. The two were so popular that they were invited to perform at the Wheeling Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia and in 1957 appeared at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

After fulfilling his military obligation, Doug Kershaw returned to the music business scoring with an autobiographical song he wrote called "Louisiana Man". The song not only sold millions of copies but over the years has become the symbol of Cajun music. In June of 1969, Kershaw made his first network television appearance on the debut of the Johnny Cash Show. He capped the year with a much-publicized, week-long engagement at the New York City's Fillmore East as opening act for Eric Clapton's Derek & the Dominos. While it seemed, to many rock and pop fans, that Kershaw had appeared out of nowhere, he had already sold more than 18-million copies of the records he had done in the early '60s with his brother, Rusty. "Louisiana Man" had been a Top 10 country hit in 1961 and its follow-up, "Diggy Diggy Lo", had done almost as well. His dynamic performance in front of a national audience led to Warner Bros. Records signing him to a long-term contract. In November of that year, "Louisiana Man" was broadcast back to earth by the crew of the Apollo 12 moon mission. Beyond the southern venues, Kershaw's popularity soon extended to mainstream urban America, playing for packed audiences at major concert halls.

Like a lot of "vintage" artists, Doug's shows have become pretty camp. The songs get played too fast, and some of the rich subtlety of the early music gets lost. That said, the last time I saw Doug was around '88, and he was still rocking pretty hard.

Here he is from 1990:



For the curious who can't quite follow the Cajun French references, here are the lyrics to Louisiana Man .

Also, there are a few videos from the same show on YouTube that seem awfully post-produced. The sounds are beyond what would come from a good recording with Kershaw's likely budget, and some of the instrumental parts don't seem to match. Still good recordings, but with a caveat on the "live".

Quotes of the Day

"He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."

[Morgan Johnson, president of the United Auto Workers local representing General Motors workers in Shreveport, said] "I don't know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we've done, it's time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him," said Johnson, president of Local 2166. Otherwise, Johnson said of Vitter, it would appear, "He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."

"It may just prove that when I have a lot of morphine in my system, I make the right decisions"

Ashcroft was confronted with a question about a March 2004 incident, in which the former AG was visited by his would-be successor as he lay sedated in a hospital bed.

Ashcroft was asked by Gonzales to re-authorize a controversial domestic spying program, over the objections of Ashcroft's deputy, James Comey. He refused to reverse the Justice Department's decision, sparking a power struggle which saw the White House re-authorize its own program without the approval of the Justice Department.

"So, I think the system worked. And I'm glad that it did. It may not prove a whole lot about a lot of things. It may just prove that when I have a lot of morphine in my system, I make the right decisions."

In honor of John Ashcroft, who still thinks illegal detention & torture are OK, but bare breasts are bad, I declare War!




Cross posted at VidiotSpeak