List XVII: "A Savage Servility Slides by on Grease"

Glenn Beck,
freed from prison
after torturing and killing
all those Pit Bulls,
pretends he poisoned
Nancy Pelosi's wine

Democratic Congressman
Lloyd Doggett
welcomed at a grocery store
with a mock marble tombstone
engraved with the name
"Lloyd Doggett"

A caller to Democratic Congressman
Bran Miller's office:
"Miller could
lose his life over this"

The day after
Miller's death threat,
Republican Congressman
Todd Akin
jokes to constituents:
"Different people
from Washington, D.C.,
come back to their districts
and have town hall meetings
and they almost got lynched,"
and Akin's audience
laughs and applauds

Democratic Congressman
Frank Kratovil
hanged in effigy outside
his office in Maryland
with an expert knotted noose

At a Christopher Dodd town hall
days after Dodd announced
he had prostate cancer:
"How come we just don't
give Chris Dodd painkillers?
Like a handful of them at a time!
He can wash it down
with Ted Kennedy's whiskey"

Democratic Congressman
Brian Baird
receives a fax
with an image of President Obama,
a hammer-and-sickle
painted on his forehead
and these words beneath him:
"Death to All Marxists!
Foreign and Domestic!"

A man drops a gun
at a meet-and-greet
with Democratic Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords

A man with a concealed gun
taken away from a town hall
hosted by Democratic Congressman
Steve Cohen

A four-foot swastika
spray-painted
on the sign for the office
of Democratic Congressman
David Scott, who also
receives a faxed death threat

Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore
receives two death threats
in a period of ten days

One of Moore's death threats
received the same week
Richard Terry Young arrested
for bringing a loaded gun
to President Obama's town hall
rally in New Hampshire

William Kostric
arrives at the rally with
a loaded gun strapped to his leg

A man stands outside
Democratic Congressman
Ben Cardin's
town hall in Maryland
with a small,
handwritten cardboard sign
that reads:
"Death to Obama"
and
"Death to Michelle
and her two stupid kids"

Hooray For Our Chains (17)

Today is the Day When the Goon Meets the Gun

When the AFL-CIO arrived at the Brady Pub at 9:40 a.m. Saturday, it received an email that said: "I will be going to a local town hall this weekend, all you union members BEWARE! We will be waiting for you. Better make sure you have arrangements with your local E.R. Today is the day when the goon meets the gun. See you there."

At Republican Congressman Mike Castle's town hall meeting in Delaware, a woman stood up and said, "Sarah Palin stole my birth certificate from the United States of American, saying I am an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor. With a hospital administrator's name. I want to know why people are ignoring that Sarah Palin yields to the impulse to steal objects that are needed neither for personal use nor for their monetary worth."

Lou Dobbs informed Mara Liasson that he was going to the courthouse to make sure Glenn Beck didn't poison Nancy Pelosi's wine.

Mara Liasson reminded him that he couldn't speak at the hearing, so Lou Dobbs agreed not to go. He declined Mara Liasson's offer to do something fun together, asserting that he needed to talk to Sara Palin, the kleptomaniac, about whether or not the America she knows and loves will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide whether they are worthy of health care.

Sarah Palin implored her son to let her accompany him for moral support, and he reluctantly agreed.

"Sarah Palin's thefts are committed neither out of anger or revenge nor in response to delusions or hallucinations," said the woman who claims she talks to angels, who claims the Earth will be destroyed in 95 million years, and who interrupted Mike Castle's Delaware town hall meeting. "Sarah Palin's kleptomania is not better explained by Antisocial Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorder, or a Manic Episode. I want my country back!"

At the hospital, Lou Dobbs noted that Sarah Palin's brain activity continued to diminish, and ordered a nurse to keep a ventilator on standby.

William Kristol arrived and greeted Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, with a kiwi. She was surprised to learn that disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was accepted as a kinswoman. William Kristol urged his imaginary wife to give it a chance, since it was what they had prayed for.

Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, agreed this was great news.

William Kristol stood over his imaginary wife, the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin, and declared that he felt like an idiot for believing that she loved him. "You have been stealing for as long as I can remember," he said. "When the teacher said, All right, Brittany and Chloe are missing their wallets, you would sit there gloomy, feeling sorry for them but also kind of relieved because you possessed something in your bag that wasn't yours."

"Who leaves their wallet lying around with a hundred-dollar bill in it?" the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin said.

Sarah Palin slipped into her rosary once she heard the tympanist. At the jamboree, Lou Dobbs was impatient for the balalaika to begin.

Happy Anniversary, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Memo!

Happy eighth anniversary to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo!

Apologies to the Hibakusha, who memorialize this day for more tragic reasons.


Even though the memo was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission that "nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S." appeared in the Presidential Daily Briefing the President received on August 6, 2001.

Full Text of the 6 August 2001 Memo:

Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate (Osama) Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a ...(edited)... service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told a ... (edited) ... service at the same time that Bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation.

Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.

Bin Laden associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qaeda members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (edited)... service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related.

The CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

My Index

Chances that a squirrel in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood reported feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" when I crushed his jugular with my gleaming, pamphagous fangs: 2 in 5

Percentage change between winter 2008 and winter 2009 in the number of times I sat on the window sill watching squirrels scratch their malefic little claws up and down the Mayakovsky Tree: +13

Number of times during that period that the Mayakovsky Tree said, "Squirrels sin in secret and picture their future as academicians with outsized rations!": 22

Estimated number of planets in the galaxy hospitable enough to support life as intelligent as cats with shiny, ageless pumpkin-colored fur: 37,964

Chances that a Twitter user accesses the service only while sitting in the bathtub staring at the spigot: 2 in 3

Ratio of the average number of microbes living in or on a squirrel's body to the average number of NF Formula food pellets that must be dropped in a bowl before the sound wakes me in the empty newspaper box under the bed: 115:1

Percentage of human genes that have been patented so far by clandestine veterinarians: 34

Estimated chance that one of these genes is owned by someone who believes that "Western culture is marked profoundly by a relativism which refuses any affirmation of an absolute and transcendent truth and thus which ruins the foundations of morality and which closes itself off to religion": 1 in 4