New Jersey-born actor Kal Penn, who played a stoner Guantanamo Bay escapee in the movies and a doctor on TV's "House," has scored a job in the White House. Way to go, dude!

Penn, 31, will become associate director in the White House Office of Public Liaison, administration officials confirmed Tuesday. The Indian-American film star will be an emissary to the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities, along with arts and entertainment groups.

Penn campaigned extensively throughout the country for President Obama last year and was a hit on college campuses.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Penn explained why he decided to leave "House." His character inexplicably committed suicide in an episode that aired Monday night.

"I was incredibly honored a couple of months ago to get the opportunity to go work in the White House," Penn explained. "I got to know the President and some of the staff during the campaign and had expressed interest in working there."

Penn described the office as the "front door" of the White House, saying he'll be responsible for doing outreach with the American public.

"They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House," he said. "It's similar to what I was doing on the campaign."

Labels: Kal Penn, movies, Obama Administration, youth

Labels: Keith Olbermann

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann says she fears the Obama administration will create “re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.” Audio after the jump.

Here’s what Bachmann said on Minnesota radio station KTLK-AM (podcast) this weekend (in reference to The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, a proposed expansion of the AmeriCorps program that Obama may sign into law this week):

It’s under the guise of — quote — volunteerism. But it’s not volunteers at all. It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. …

I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.

...founded a publicly funded Christian charter school where creationism was taught in biology classes and, according to the Minneapolis City Pages, students were forbidden from viewing the Disney movie Aladdin because it supposedly contained anti-Christian themes. After spearheading a failed right-wing takeover attempt of the Stillwater, Minnesota, school board, Bachmann won a state senate seat in 2000 with the backing of several churches in her district.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, just another outrage, wingnuttia

Labels: misogyny

Labels: health care, just another outrage

Labels: bloggers

Labels: anger management, wingnuttia

Neither George W. Bush's deliberate silence about the Obama administration nor Dick Cheney's ready criticism of it appear to have altered U.S. public perceptions about either man. The former president and former vice president are each viewed unfavorably by 63% of Americans, very similar to where they stood with the public in their final White House years.

The last reading on Bush's favorability that Gallup recorded during his presidency came in a Jan. 9-11, 2009, survey. At that time, 40% of Americans viewed him favorably and 59% unfavorably. However, this represented an unusual spurt in positive feelings toward Bush, possibly due to changes in media coverage of the embattled president as his term ended, or because of Americans' generally buoyant mood leading up to Inauguration Day. (Barack Obama's favorable reading in the same survey was also higher than in previous and subsequent polling.)

[snip]

Despite Bush's seemingly "post-partisan" stance toward the new president, Democrats' reactions to Bush remain overwhelmingly negative. Only 10% have a favorable view of him and 89% an unfavorable view, little different from their views of him in August of last year -- at the height of the rancorous election season.

Labels: George W. Bush, polls

Labels: Republican id-driven two-year-olds, vote suppression

Limbaugh on support from African-Americans and gays for progressives: “Democrats will bend over, grab the ankles, and say, ‘Have your way with me.’”

– Limbaugh on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s (R) so-called “Troopergate” scandal: “This is pure sexism in Alaska on the part of these old boys trying to get rid of Sarah Palin, and she didn’t put up with it, and she didn’t bend over and let them have their way.”

Labels: Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh, things that make you go "hmmmmm....."

Labels: Michelle Obama

LONDON, March 30, 2009 – Ground Zero for the so-called 'war on terror' is a nation where gays and lesbians live in real terror every day. Among the suffering of gay Iraqis is the regular threat (and carrying out) of rape and murder. In July, CNN reported on the case of a young gay man abducted for ransom and raped daily for more than two weeks.

More than 100 prisoners in Iraq are facing execution. Many of them, says an underground gay rights organization in the country, are believed to have been convicted of the 'crime' of being gay, the UK-based Iraqi-LGBT group revealed this afternoon.

According to Ali Hili of Iraqi-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week. There is, said Hili, at least one member of Iraqi-LGBT who are among those to be put to death.

And the London-based group, which believes that a total of 128 executions are imminent, is calling on the UK Government, international human rights groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to intervene "with due speed" to prevent "this tragic miscarriage of justice" from going ahead.

"We have information and reports on members of our community whom been arrested and waiting for execution for the crimes of homosexuality," Mr Hili told UK Gay News.

"Iraqi-LGBT has been a banned from running activities on Iraqi soil," he revealed.

"Raids by the Iraqi police and Ministry of Interior forces cost our group [to the extent of] diapering and killing of 17 members working for Iraqi-LGBT since 2005.

"The death penalty has been increasing at an alarming rate in Iraq since the new Iraqi regime reintroduced it in August 2004.

"In 2008, at least 285 people were sentenced to death, and at least 34 executed. In 2007 at least 199 people were sentenced to death and 33 were executed, while in 2006 at least 65 people were put to death.

"The actual figures," Mr. Hili suggested, "could be much higher as there are no official statistics for the number of prisoners facing execution."

Labels: gay rights, medievalism, Middle East, rape

Well before the waters of the Red River were expected to reach their most threatening levels here, Dennis Walaker, the mayor, received a telephone call from President Obama.

The president said Fargo would get whatever help it needed, the mayor recounted, gushing over how it felt for “just a big kid from a small North Dakota town” to get such a high-placed pledge.

The telephone call last week was but a hint of the degree to which the Obama administration, faced with what threatened to become the first major disaster of its short tenure, turned federal resources to the fast-rising rivers in North Dakota and Minnesota.

By all indications, the reaction — possibly, some here suggest, the overreaction — was a signal of lessons learned from the Bush administration’s widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“We had federal people on the ground to the point where they were getting in the way,” said Pat Zavoral, the Fargo city administrator. “And we had National Guard people on the ground to the point where they were getting in the way.”

Grateful for the resources nonetheless, Mr. Zavoral added, “But that’s the way we want it.”

Labels: Flooding

Labels: Ed Schultz, media, MSNBC

Right off the bat, what you know about Nat Berman is that he doesn’t grasp that women are animate, self-aware, intelligent beings who can do things besides appear in his imagination (alas, as you’ll see, not so much in his bed) as passive cock receptacles.  In case his contempt for women isn’t clear enough, he illustrates his blog with many pictures to let you know that he is too All Man, and any suggestions otherwise will be met with more pictures of half-naked women and insistence that he enjoys many sporting events. 

I bring this up because this asswipe and the NY Post are trying to get Joe Biden’s daughter fired because she did not, during her stint as a student at Tulane, fuck this douchebag.  Which is just as well, because if she did, he’d probably try to get her fired for that, because if you’re not a withholding prude, you’re an evil slut, as you’ll soon see.  Well, let’s dive right into the tale of Nice Guy® woe, where young men are unjustly unrewarded with pussy for coughing up $200.

Ashley Blazer Biden is the 27-year-old daughter of Senator Joe Biden our new Vice President and running mate of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. She is a social worker who is employed with the Delaware Department of Children, Youth and Families.  Biden is also a board member of the Delaware organization.

In other words, ladies, if you ever meet this guy, run away and don’t give him your name, because if you don’t fuck him when he thinks you should, he’ll get all creepy stalkery.  Douchebag went to Tulane, and he was, even as a young man, a creepy old man.

Labels: misogyny, perverts, Republicans

Since we don’t have any of this money that’s now being dispensed from Washington, DC; since we’re going out and printing money and we’re issuing debt to solve a problem that was created by too much debt; since that’s taking place, and since those costs will be borne by the next generation, in fact it is sort of fiscal child abuse to do what we’re doing.

Labels: Republican id-driven two-year-olds

Labels: Republican id-driven two-year-olds