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Miss South Carolina Answers a Question

(hat tip to Astrobuff, who alerted us to this fine video on a Saturday night)

The Nuge Sucks More Than Ever

As Kayakbiker suggested, I am "front-paging" Nyc's link and comments about "The Nuge."
Slugbug

The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbqYiZo9Fo and several other versions have appeared at YouTube, as well as at DailyKos and Crooks and Liars. Mainstream media has given it minimal notice.
Here's the transcript:
"Nugent:
I was in Chicago last week I said—Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk?
Obama, he’sa piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns…
Let’s hear it for them.
I was in NY and I said hey Hillary—you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch…
Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find– she might wanna suck on my machine gun!
Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.
Any questions?
Freeeeedom!"

Nyc's comment:

Unbelievable.

Special Agent Read, if you're reading this, how about investigating this guy? I understand that addition to his rabid fans, his got more than a Sharpie at his disposal...

More like his own private armory, which means that he has the means, ability and intent to carry out these threats.

Isn't that grounds enough to confiscate his weapons, permanently?

I mean, after all, there's a very clear line, and this thing did more than just cross it, he incited others to do the same.

UPDATE (from Slugbug):
I watched it. He sucks. His career is finished.

This is from the DailyKos diary, one of several that have appeared on the topic in the last two days, but finally one has reached "Recommended" status:

When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks merely said that she was ashamed that Bush was from the same state as her, the group was hounded by the media, blacklisted by radio stations, and victimized by boycotts and demonstrations. Right-wing outrage over lyrics by rapper, Ludacris, cost him a Pepsi commercial contract. George Clooney, Sean Penn, Barbara Streisand and more, have all felt the sting of the "Shut up and sing" crowd. What do you suppose would have happened if anyone of them had waved firearms in a public concert hall and hurled profanities at John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. And why hasn't the so-called liberal media risen to assert their so-called moral outrage at this atrocity by a conservative so-called entertainer?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/25/7914/34361

Stuff I found out (from Kos site):

Zappa and Nugent actually toured together once, and Frank clowned the crap out of him by going on stage once Ted was done and playing his one lone riff at triple speed for thirty seconds just to point out how lame and unimaginative Ted's guitar playing actually is.

..Ted did a Wall Street Journal OpEd last summer, blaming hippies for divorce, abortion, drugs.
..Ted says he might run for Governor (of Michigan) against Granholm. (Doesn't seem to like women)
..Ted is an "immigration policy expert" according to FOX News and was interviewed for their business news (wearing cowboy hat). - video is at the Kos site

From his Wall Street Journal interview

On the Summer Of Love: “Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs.”

On Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Mama Cass: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit.

On the hippie movement: “Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”

On life as the Nuge: “Clean and sober for 59 years, I am still rocking my brains out and approaching my 6,000th concert. Clean and sober is the real party.”

From Kos comments - more "deep thoughts" from Nugent:
"... And in my mind, I'm going why can't I just shoot this guy in the spine right now; shoot him in the spine, explain the facts of life to him... [Ted referring to an encounter with a Hare Krishna]" - WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., September 28, 1990

He claims that 30 days before his draft board physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days, he ingested nothing but Vienna sausages and Pepsi; and a week before his physical, he stopped using bathrooms altogether, virtually living inside pants caked with his own excrement, stained by his urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment, he says. "... but if I would have gone over there, I'd have been killed, or I'd have killed, or I'd killed all the hippies in the foxholes...I would have killed everybody." - Detroit Free Press Magazine , July 15, 1990

Finally, in conclusion, among the comments at DailyKos, I see this:
My friend saw this and CALLED THE SECRET SERVICE
this morning. . . the man on the other end had not heard about it but went to his computer and watched the video which was linked thru CrooksAndLiars. . . he then told my friend thank you, that although it was a diatribe given in a concert and therefore an entertainment issue, he would investigate it and notified the proper authorities. .....FWIW. What I want to know is, how come in Rwanda the radio guy telling the people that "the cockroaches must be exterminated" was universally considered hate speech and a primary cause of the genocide, but here in the good ole US of A, it's just entertainment???

Al Franken and Dick Cheney have gone to seed

I attended the Minnesota State fair today and took a few pictures. As I did last year, I visited the  the agriculture building to see this year's entries of  framed images in a medium called crop art. Crop art is made by gluing seeds, one by one, to a canvas. In some categories, the seeds have to be their natural color and the seed has to grow in Minnesota. In others, the seeds are painted.

Here are some of my favorites from this year:

Al Franken, a candidate for US Senate (Artist Kim Cope, Minneapolis, MN).

Here is the seed legend for the Al Franken piece.


And here is evil Dick Cheney (Artist Teresa Anderson, St Paul, MN).  I wonder if you threw water on this one if we would end up with a Chia Cheney.


Here's Dolly Parton, but the artist, Linda Paulson of Hackensack, MN, omitted part of her signature look --  a rhinestone-studded costume. It's still a great piece. 



I have a penchant for peace and social justice themes in art and that's why  I am including this collage from the fine arts building. The topic is Katrina (Artist Shelly N.C. Holl, Edina, MN):




I hope if someone sends you this I hope you don't feel like you were spammed (below, artist Faith Farrell, Minneapolis, MN).


Cause it's some pretty corny  stuff:


After taking these pics I ate a pork chop on a stick, some french fries, and a loganberry ice cream pastry. Then I headed for the bus stop to return home. Mission accomplished. 

NO...END...IN...SIGHT

About this film:

Charles Ferguson sold his startup to Microsoft for $133 million. After paying off investors, he was left with $14 million of Microsoft stock. He then asked, "What should I do?"

This is his first film. He is a former software entrepreneur, think tank analysis, tech consultant, math major, and also by now has a political science doctorate from MIT. Somehow, he has managed to show what..went..wrong. He interviews Richard Armitage, Lawrence Wilkerson, General Garner.

We all need to see this.

Hempfest 4:20

Hempfest 2007

Seattle has had Hempfest for 16 years and it's one of my favorite photo-ops. Like the Fremont Solstice Fair with the naked bicyclists, it's a "family affair" as well as a trade fair, music & political fest. Yet people still decline to give their name to reporters. 150,000 or so visit the two-day event, largest in the country and costing $200,000 to produce, which is held on the waterfront.

Medical marijuana has been legal in Washington since 1998 and recreational marijuana in small amounts has been lowest police enforcement priority for a couple of years. The US outlaws cultivation of hemp as well as its importation, therefore both the drug and the fiber, yet even Nordstrom carries hemp clothing. Hemp can grow fast, without pesticides and can be blended with other textiles. According to the Seattle Times, domestic paraphernalia makers complain that China has cornered the market on borosilicate, cutting into their glass water pipe business.

My strategy was to walk up one side and down the other several times with my camera, ending up at the most crowded place at 4:20, when I would wander into the crowd. People smoked openly, with police on horseback circulating through occasionally. On the way home, I met quite a few teens who had come in from the suburbs. Some hoped their parents didn't know where they'd been, while others claimed theirs could smoke them under the table.

According to Seattle PI, Edmonds travel guru Rick Steves returned from Europe for the event. He referred to the Declaration of Independence and its call for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Many Europeans, he added, compare marijuana use to alcohol rather than luming it in with heroin as in US.

(More Hempfest photos to follow later)

Seattle Couple Has Obsession With British Authors

Will Self
The man first heard of Will Self's Cock and Bull in a 1980s issue of Details magazine and went on to purchase his entire catalog (as it was written), including obscure tracts only available in Britain. He went so far as to take cheap flights to the UK to scour small bookstores in search of them. He also went to the Groucho Club, where alleged former junkie and "enfant terrible of literature" Will Self was known to hang out, but he got booted out (it being a private club). When Will Self came to Seattle on a book tour, he was in the front row, and met the author afterwards but, alas, didn't get invited to have a beer with him in some dingy dive. He will no doubt order Will's upcoming book, Psychogeography, as soon as he possibly can. When shown the list of books from Will's website, he mentioned another one that wasn't on there, something about "psychosis."

Will has a blog at www.will-self.com

Books: Books
Cock And Bull, Dorian, Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe, Feeding Frenzy, Great Apes, Grey Area, How The Dead Live, Introductions, Junk Mail, My Idea Of Fun, Perfidious Man, The Book Of Dave, The Quantity Theory Of Insanity, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys

Lawrence Osborne

The woman has an obsession with Lawrence Osborne, who writes for Salon and the New York Times. It started when she read Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendour and Squalour of the City, in which he wanders Paris subways and, in one instance, hires a Berber prostitute (with exotic teeth). This book she has read at least ten times and partially because of it, has gone to Paris an equal number of times. By coincidence, he wrote a book on Asperger syndrome (she works with Aspergers patients, which only deepened her fascination, particularly since he himself has a fascination with Iron Chef tv show and will only stay in Red Roof Inns.) This only makes him more intriguing, along with the fact that he claims not to have had a home for decades.

Recently, she got Fed-Ex'd his book about travelling to Papua, New Guinea via Dubai, Mumbai and Burma and is currently staying up late reading it despite the fact that she has to get up for work at 6 AM. Once, before heading to Paris, she once tracked him down via his publisher and he sent her an intoxicatingly cool email about where to get couscous and wine (& of course was intimately familiar with the relatively untouristy Place de Republique where she would be staying). She is rereading "American Normal" at work, slowly, and getting paid for it.

She thinks the best quote so far in his new book, The Accidental Tourist, is "When the neighborhood is described as seedy by some "Lonely Planet" prude, I immediately head there."

Books:
Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City, Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism, Ania Molina, The Angelic Game, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, American Normal, The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

Bush Compares Iraq to Vietnam

Bush gave a speech today to a VFW group about Iraq comparing it to Vietnam.  He believes the US should not abandon Iraq the way it did Vietnam, a retreat that resulted in boat people, killing fields, and by my observation, a lot of Pho restaurants in the Twin Cities.

Bush should have told the VFW that the mistake was going into Iraq rather than wanting to leave once the mistake was made.  But he could have searched his own words and come up with that answer (from Think Progress):

War Bush’s ‘Lessons Of Vietnam’

Prior the Iraq war, George W. Bush claimed that he had learned some powerful lessons from the Vietnam war. Among those lessons were the fact that U.S. must be “slow to engage troops.” “We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush said, adding that “the cause must be just”:

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear and the victory must be overwhelming. [Bush address to RNC convention, 8/4/00]

The Republican presidential front-runner also says he learned “the lesson of Vietnam.” “Our nation should be slow to engage troops. But when we do so, we must do so with ferocity. We must not go into a conflict unless we go in committed to win. We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush wrote. [AP, 11/15/99, reporting on Bush’s biography A Charge To Keep]

Forgetting entirely the lessons that he claimed to have learned from a war in which he did not serve, Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 hastily, without just cause, and lacking a clear goal. For years, he maintained Iraq and Vietnam had no similarities. In April 2004, he said:

QUESTION: How do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.

Meanwhile, at least 15 more US soldiers died today in Iraq.

Lily Allen trashes Winehouse and Bush

Lily Allen was drinking on stage at a pop festival in New Zealand yesterday when she blasted Amy Winehouse:

 

"It's the end of the weekend, you have got to have a drink. Here's to Amy Winehouse... ha!" l these skinny girls in the magazines, 'Look at me, look at me' - heroin addicts!

"You are not that skinny unless you have an eating disorder or a drug habit."

Lily also complained mockingly about being banned from the US:  "I'm going to dedicate this to the US. Obviously I'm really sad I can't do my US tour. Shame on you, the US Immigration Service."

She's banned from the US and she's not trying to win any points with US Homeland Security.  On live TV She called Bush a f**king C*nt? She also said:

Who else can f**k off? People who edit fashion magazines... that makes us ladies feel awful. We're all beautiful - it's the heroin addict models who've got the problem,” she added.

I think it's a good bet that she won't win the MTV award. Criticizing Bush will gain her a few points, but criticism of a competitor is a serious mistake.  But she's young and is from a working class background which makes her more likely to let someone know what she's thinking.  Isn't that better than pretending to be nice?