As the Democratic National Convention kicks off today I thought it would be interesting to go back and read our fair and sensible president’s charm for the Amurhican peoples back when he was still just an unpopular governor of Texas and the pride of a nation had yet to be fully skinned and hung to tether beneath a constant banner of war and lost jobs.

It’s got everything you’d expect: folksy aphorisms, stupid fucking jokes, a diminutizing attitude toward the office, and a temporal rhyme scheme that could make your skin crawl. It’s classic W. even as he was still very early in discovering his true latent identity as the Decider.

But hindsight is 20/20, right? So, using this retarded rag of a speech as a template, I think it will be fun to hear Obama & company’s bombastic, sincere-sounding orations, as well as the RNC’s snivelling contributions, and fantasize about how these seemingly well-intended words will be dialated and fucked over the next few years.

Come on, Washington, how you gonna let us down next? These are very big shoes to fill.

Check it out! The Scorpion - a 200,000 volt taser on one end, pepper spray on the other.

This is the only way to properly prepare one’s midnight snack!

I’m going to try and get a demo of this for review on the show. Stay tuned…

Viking compadre Downtown Dave has posted an interesting assessment of the conflict between Georgia and Russia, it’s people’s histories and how this all may be at the orchestral mitt of that old cum sucker Karl Rove:

“At any rate, with so much of TurdBlossom’s sausagy fingers stirring this incredibly dangerous pot, and McCain’s unbelievable bellicosity running amok, the media have been predictably been floating the notion that all of this killing going on down in the Caucasus is somehow good for McCain. The old cold warrior appears to be on the warpath again, dying to re-fight the battles of the past. I think the jury is still terrifically “out” as to whether all of this is going to be good for RepubliCons or a disaster. But what’s clear to me is that once again, the neocons are trying to manipulate international crises as an electoral strategy designed to win over their rabid, war-loving base, whom they’re sure to keep absolutely paralyzed with fear, to such a point that they don’t realize how the Corporate Machine is fucking them over every single day of their god-damned lives.”

Read the whole post here

Maureen Dowd wrote a powerful and unnerving piece on the implications of a shifting Russian strategy the other day.

“But after 9/11, he let Cheney, Rummy and the neocons gull him into a destructive obsession with Iraq. While America has been bogged down and bled dry, China and Russia are plumping up. China has bought so much of the U.S. that we Americans would be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires - all through our addiction to oil.”

Read the whole thing here

I’m proud to say that I spent the early part of this week building another site for film maker and Viking comrade Wayne Ewing. This newest site is for his most recent project that will debut at the Denver Film Festival in November, The Border Wall. From the site:

The Border Wall examines the effect of the Wall where it began as a double fence in San Diego in the 1990’s. Local activists argue that militarization of the border and the walls have simply driven undocumented aliens to cross through more dangerous terrain, causing the deaths of over 5000 people. However, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R., CA) – the author of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, claims that there was a 50% drop in crime in San Diego County after the walls went up along the border, and that the wall saves lives.

In Arizona, The Border Wall looks at the seven miles of wall recently built near Sasabe, and discovers a horde of illegal immigrants simply going around the end of the wall into mountainous terrain where the filmmakers find two Mexican ladies lost and terrified. Undocumented immigrants dying of thirst in the desert often find help from No More Deaths, an organization of volunteers dedicated to saving lives in the desert of Southern Arizona, and the film follows them patrolling the desert, and cleaning up the immense amounts of trash left behind by migrants.

Also in Arizona, The Border Wall examines a legal challenge by the Defenders of Wildlife to wall construction in the fragile San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area which was at first successful in the fall of 2006 in persuading a federal judge to halt all construction. But Secretary Chertoff invoked the extraordinary power given him by Congress with the Real ID Act of 2005 to waive any law that he determines stands in his way of building the wall. Chertoff waived 19 laws.

Wayne is best known for his extraordinary documentary on the Good Doctor, “Breakfast with Hunter”. You also may remember our interview with him discussing “When I Die”. In the past few years Wayne has put his focus back on issues of justice - or lack of justice - in the American system. I’m looking forward to seeing the completed film in November some of which will be shown during tonight’s airing of NOW on PBS.