while not exactly cooking something up, the work.group has reheated an old dish, making hash of leftovers and serving it with a side of salsa verde; the delicacy is known as ex_nihilo.

~ congratulations for dick cheney are in order; he has the dubious honour of having said the most outrageous thing we have heard since jerry falwell told us that the september 11 attacks were our punishment from god for our harboring of gays and the aclu. admittedly, if you were vice president of an administration that has accomplished nothing except no bid contracts to your former company, one which still pays you deferred salary and has not accounted for over $1 billion money it has received from the gov’t, presided over the first loss of jobs since the great depression, the loss of health insurance for 5 million americans, and allowed another 1.3 million americans to fall below the poverty line this year, you’d probably be reduced to threatening americans that if they vote for your opponent that they will be killed, too. the ‘double-digit’ lead reportedly enjoyed by bush for a couple of days was troubling, indeed, but when one watches the incumbents, who were presumably ‘making us safe’ or whatever for the past three years, become so desperate that they tell us we will die without them in office, one is heartened.

we know that republicans try to inspire irrational fears into americans, such as the fear of gays who will destroy the family or the fear that minorities will get to vote or the fear that you will not own a bigger car than your father owned, but this is the most blatant and explicit threat—that of death—that we have seen. we mean, who remembers lyndon johnson’s campaign ad with the mushroom cloud? who remembers the billboards with black hands reaching for a white child under the heading ‘vote republican’?

~ speaking of not ‘making us safe’ after all, if we do get the terrorist attack promised by dick cheney, will we also get a refund on that $200 billion spent on a war in iraq that was supposed to keep the terrorists at bay? “we’ll fight them in mosul, so we won’t have to fight them in macon”…or something.

~ speaking of losing in iraq, some of you may recall that the angry red planet declared that the radical moqtada al-sadr would not be captured alive; and after countless deaths and the annihilation of najaf, we are back were we started. the us army – and some marines – had to watch al-sadr walk away unscathed whilst declaring the delightful news that he was going to ‘enter politics’; he was given a free pass by the iraqi gov’t last month, so his boys were able to kill seven marines this weekend. what are we going to do next year when the iraqi gov’t (supposedly) is no longer appointed by the u.s.?

~ if anyone from npr is listening, could you clarify what you mean when you say ‘moderate radicals’ condemn the killing of school kids in russia? is it ‘radical’ to kill anyone who disagrees with your religion/politics, but only ‘moderate’ if you don’t kill children? our guess is a ‘moderate radical’ only kills teenagers? what if you are a teenage male who kills adults in order to keep their politics out of your religion?

~ You’ll have to take our word for it when we say that we crafted a witty and astute retort to the attitudes and misrepresentations in a recent speech by one of our Senators. However, considering that the senator’s strategy is that he would rather be a pariah of notoriety than a pissant in obscurity, we reckon it would be best to spend no more bytes on his memory. regardless of how well he tore his party a new one, his true dubious accomplishment is that many more folks throughout the rest of the country think that georgians are opportunistic back stabbers. rather than rant and rave about this sellout, we’ll wait until november 2nd and watch him wonder where all of his new found friends have gone.

~ this is not about our senator, but about the reaction of the delegates to parts of his speech: why does a Republican delegate cheer when someone says something like “the b1 bomber dropped 40% of the bombs” on anyone. is it just to disturb those of us who do not find titillation in the violent death of others?

~ when the seas of shit are at full tide, or, if you will, the poppies of shit are in full blossom, a cheering domain name briefly clears the foul air: www.zellout.com. though simple, it certainly beats the typically uninspired, pseudo-political slogans we must tolerate, such as ‘lick bush’ or ‘cheney is a dick’.

~ make no mistake, we have no interest in john mccain. we are mystified by the democrats who go into convulsions of heavy panting with the thought that he will somehow grace them with a kind word. the man is a conservative and a republican. he is not a friend. do democrats think that he will someday reveal himself to be the standard bearer of their party, just because george w. bush tore him to shreds in the 2000 primary? does that mean that we can expect joe lieberman and dick gephardt to jump over to the republicans because john kerry talked shit about them in the democratic primaries? lieberman is a bad example, granted, but the point is that these aren’t real people, like dennis kucinich, who have a sense of honour and dignity; they are machines that will accept anything that they are told will help them advance their careers.

as stated, we are not interested in john mccain, or any of the automatons that are droning at the republican convention. we are interested, however, in language, in both a literal and literary sense. therefore, our interest was piqued when we heard this quote on the radio:

“We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.” -john mccain, republican national convention

this sounds familiar to us, perhaps something that general pershing might say to american soldiers who were about to battle the boche.

“You are going to meet a savage enemy. Meet them like Americans.”-general john pershing, 1918

that is not exactly what we had in mind; we were remembering the phrase ‘tough and determined’, not ‘savage’. a quick search brought us disappointing results.

“We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy.” -mel gibson, ‘we were soldiers’

has john mccain confused his real service in vietnam with mel gibson’s fake service in a vietnam movie? has the republican strategy for domination become so laced with lies and falsehoods that we are cutting the delineation between reality and fiction? does the arrival of schwarzenegger herald an era of swiping riffs from the most base and visceral of action flicks? if so, we might tune in for the convention after all, if we will hear cheney explaining the failure of the war on terror with a line from ‘road warrior’ or ‘lethal weapon 4’.

outside of this circus, this stealing of lines is the most pathetic display of oratory skills since new york businessmen-cum-politicians stood at the site of the destroyed world trade center and re-delivered speeches, like the gettysburg address, written and given by others, because none of our living ‘leaders’ have the abilities to equal the situation in which we find ourselves.

“game over, man!”

~ would the man who sang, “if you have political convictions, keep them to yourself”, appreciate having his post-mortem personage being co-opted by a political party and/or agenda? defend johnny cash [w] doesn’t think that would be the case. the angry red planet agrees, but only if the proposition applies equally to the democrats, greens, libertarians, anarchists, etc.

karl rove has a dry erase board somewhere in texas that contains a matrix with the following elements: 1. the lie. 2. number of minds swayed by the lie. 3. number of minds swayed by reaction to the lie. 4. embarrassment of being caught in a lie. if number 3 is less than number 2, then number 4 is wiped from the board and from consideration.
regardless of the fact that the “swift boaters” campaign has been proven to be a fraud, the percentage of voters who are voting based on kerry’s war record has fallen from 41% to 22% since the convention. the lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how many times democrats prove the accusations false; the psychological effect is the same. don’t we remember the calls that were made in south carolina in 2000? “if you heard that john mccain fathered an illegitimate black child, would it make you more or less likely to vote for him?”..”he did that?”..”i’m not saying that he did, but if he did, would you vote for him?”.
note that we are not saying that we might as well let the republicans continue to tell lies; we are only pointing out that the micromanaging of debunking every salvo is not successful. should we lie in return? or should we ignore them and tell other truths? probably neither of these are the answer.
kerry wasted a lot of time talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago; in return for that, we all wasted a lot of time talking about the swift boat veterans who were talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago. partisan politics aside, bush’s presidency has been a disaster; he is the first president to hold office over a loss of jobs since the great depression, the number of americans without health insurance has risen to 45 million, ‘no child left behind’ remains unfunded, 1.3 million more people have fallen into poverty for a total of 35.9 million impoverished amercians,… hell, you know there are a thousand reasons [w] to vote against bush; we don’t need to list them all here.
for these past three weeks, we could have been talking about any number of these failures, but instead we all bickered over stupid shit like how many bullet holes are in john kerry’s boat and whether he turned the boat left or right. with bush’s dismal lack of accomplishment, his opponent should be mopping the floor with him right now; our fixation on whether or not kerry acted like rambo or like sir robin 30 years ago is a good reason why kerry pathetically can barely break even with bush. there’s a war in iraq today that we could discuss; or are we going to wait 30 years until an iraq veteran makes guard duty in kirkuk the focus of his campaign? the republicans’ control of our debate has doubtlessly left a smiley face doodled on that texan dry erase board.

~ an addendum to yesterday”s kerry vs. vietnam rant: perhaps if kerry”s braggadocio about serving in vietnam was tempered with some regret at the entire debacle which cost the lives of 58,000 americans and two million vietnamese, it would be easier to take. instead of talking like vietnam was a great opportunity for someone to demonstrate that he/she can be a bad ass, maybe he could simply state that, though the vietnam adventure proved to be a mistake, he served as honourably has he could while still trusting his government. it isn”t like he has to explain his slitting of sleeping women”s throats, like senator bob kerrey has done. kerry doesn”t have to say “i acted dishonourably” or even “i didn”t kick ass”, but it would be helpful if he mentioned that the entire scene was regrettable and a shameful part of u.s. history – kind of like he did in the 1970″s. there must be some way for kerry to pretend to be as tough of a guy as bush pretends to be – without telling us that vietnam was a lot of fun.

~ for our confused, non-atlanta-based readers, ponce is not a thing, it is a place. it is short for “ponce de leon avenue”, which is a thoroughfare from midtown atlanta out to decatur and eventually stone mountain. ponce cuts through the upscale residential area of druid hills, which was laid out by frederick law olmstead of new york city’s central park fame. the stretch of ponce between briarcliff and decatur still contains the lush linear parks and the nationally registered homes that were built according to the plans of olmstead and his son, j.c.olmstead. the western stretch of ponce, between downtown and briarcliff, where “the incident” occurred, is less pastoral; it is highly developed and congested and inhospitable to human life.
another feature of ponce is that it once served (and still does to some extent) as the unofficial dividing line between whites and blacks in eastern atlanta; the names of streets change as they cross ponce, so that whites and blacks would not have to live on the same street; briarcliff becomes moreland, monroe becomes boulevard, charles allen becomes jackson. you can also see this phenomenon in new york city at 110th street, in case you can”t make it to the south.

~ after a days long struggle to extract some files from our old school camera, we have finally been able to lend some credibility to the ‘tour of atlanta’ by adding a second site, the lake building. if someone can tell us when this piece was built, we would appreciate it.

we know that the “swift boat veterans for truth” are lying, and we know that they are illegally coordinating their efforts with the bush campaign. both of these revelations have been proved in the popular press. of course, the situation is annoying: the situation in which republicans who haven’t served tear down the military service of veterans (bush vs. mccain & chambliss vs. cleland), in which a former ‘band of brothers’ concocts stories to smear one of their own, in which a candidate claims to have nothing to do with a group with whom he shares a lawyer and distributes fliers. we know all this; is it necessary for democrats to continually tear open the holes in their stories, considering that most of us would never have heard of the attacks if we had not been presented with the ‘defense’. in other words, democrats have only increased these swift boaters’ popularity are we still going to be discrediting these veterans on november 10th?

as stated, it is annoying to hear the lies and spin from the republicans. however, there is something more annoying: watching the democrats waving the bloody shirt and picking through the most excruciating details of the occurrences, such as what the viet cong was wearing, if the arm kerry used to pull a guy from the river was actually the bleeding arm, and whether it is okay so shoot charlie in the back.

have you heard the anecdotes about republicans holding their noses and voting for kerry this november? of course you have, and you should probably know that there are plenty of democrats and independents who will be doing the same thing. those of us who supported a liberal like kucinich or a progressive like dean are not at all enthusiastic about the centrist standard bearer that the democratic machine installed as the nominee.

we can not stress enough how much some of us who are – and were – opposed the the war in iraq, and were somehow prescient enough to understand that bush was going to start it regardless of the forces which noted that it would be a mistake, such as the u.n., our allies, weapons inspectors , the c.i.a. (kerry and his apologists somehow think that there is a difference between voting for the war and voting to give authorization to a guy who is hellbent on starting the war to start the war), find it distasteful and unnerving that kerry is swaggering around like rambo just because some republicans call him a sissy. we would truly be reassured to see him putting some energy into detailing what he plans to do about the quagmire in iraq next year than constantly reiterating that his feelings are hurt when someone declares that he was not a ‘hero’ for four months over 30 years ago.

the republicans know that a lie or smear, even if disproved, will still have enough of an effect in the minds of voters to make it worth the effort and embarrassment to spread the lie in the first place. so while al franken or media matters – both well-meaning – are busy talking about minutiae, such as whose initials were on kerry’s after action reports and how many bullet holes were in kerry’s boat (three), the people whose minds the republicans wished to affect have already been made up, and the republicans have moved on to something else, leaving the democrats to waste time on damage control. they say that generals always fight the previous war; democrats seem to fight the previous week’s allegations.

sadly, the u.s.a. is not a very introspective nation. the angry red planet would like for to see our contests involve more debate, more depth, and less compression, but in a nation that is so full of anti-intellectualism that liberals are chided for having educations (unless the don’t have them, then they are lemmings), it seems that the willful ignorance of the consuming class is systemic, something to which the republican focus groups cater and develop, not something at which they arrive after overcoming some brilliant curiosity. the case isn’t that americans are too stupid to have a sincere discussion, it seems that they just refuse to do so. people don’t want to know where hotdogs come from, so it follows that they don’t want to hear that china is loaning us money to make up for tax cuts made during a war that will allow us to continue to have enough cheap gas to distance ourselves from our neighbors.

we know kerry was in vietnam; who cares? a lot of men were in vietnam; it does not convince us that they are qualified to institute single payer health care and to lead the restructuring of the c.i.a. if kerry hadn’t marched around the nation, saluting like a clown after his convention, then the veterans who he pissed off back in the 70’s would not be coming out of their holes to tear him a new one. the lessons of ’88 were that, if you let attacks go unanswered, you will lose; the lessons of ’00 were that if you answer every attack, you will lose. kerry should have just said ‘yes, i was in vietnam; they gave me some medals for killing some guys; it was an unfortunate time’ and left it behind him. going on and on like it was a great thing to be an american soldier in vietnam (we mean this in the political sense of what are americans doing in vietnam?!, not that there aren’t american soliders who are great), and that it is relevant to making policy today is just going to draw out the ridiculous debate of who is a hero and who is a killer, when most of us would really like to hear such a debate about something that actually matters to the u.s.a. in 2004.

~ is kerry finally trying to appeal to nader fans by utilizing arcane, inaccessible verbiage?

Stewart also sought answers to another hard-hitting question: “Is it true that every time I use ketchup, your wife gets a nickel?” The candidate’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, derived her wealth from her late husband, an heir to the Heinz food fortune.

“Would that it were,” Kerry said.

~ the US military is still holding back from storming the ‘3rd most holy shrine in islam’ because it will piss off the people who already hate them. we don’t see how this war/peace/occupation can be won by an army who is fighting on the terms of the enemy. in world war 2, the british did not have any qualms about killing more french civilians than they killed nazis when bombing caen. seriously, as much as we find the ‘explanations’ about islamic culture by western press laughable and condescending, we probably don’t want to see u.s. marines tearing down mosques, despite our rabid belief in the separation of church and state. although the angry red planet did once say that we’d like to see spain go war against morocco, just out of curiosity.