I'm still trying to decide if Barack Obama is stupid, naive, delusional, brain-damaged, bought-and-sold or a combination of all five. Otherwise, I cannot find a rational explanation for him addressing the US Star Chamber of Commerce today and thinking he can appeal to the patriotism of CEOs who are bound and determined to destroy America by hook and especially by crook.

Under a guise of strained civility, Obama said in part, "I understand that you’re under incredible pressure to cut costs and keep your margins up. I understand the significance of your obligations to your shareholders. I get it. But as we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation."

Now, it's bad enough when Obama has to essentially steal from a dead Democrat, and one who stood up to Big Business, especially Big Steel during its 1962 strike. But he quoted the wrong speech by Kennedy.

When Big Steel pulled a bait and switch and got the workers to stop striking for better wages in exchange for a promise not to raise steel prices only to raise the price when a strike was avoided, Kennedy was hopping mad and delivered an address that should be dusted off and trotted out every time Big Business pulls something scummy like this. This is what Kennedy said in part on April 11, 1962 (slightly edited for historical relevance):

In this serious hour in our Nation's history when we are confronted with grave crises... when we are devoting our energies to economic recovery and stability, when we are asking reservists to leave their homes and their families for months on end and servicemen to risk their lives... and asking union members to hold down their wage requests at a time when restraint and sacrifice are being asked of every citizen, the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of... executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of... Americans.

The "tiny handful of executives" to which Kennedy was angrily referring was, of course, the steel executives who had betrayed the public trust as well as that of their steel workers. The workers, in a show of unity and shared sacrifice, did their part but the steel executives did not and asked for a $6 a ton increase once they'd gotten what they wanted.

Kennedy could've used this as a springboard for demanding government regulation of every business and every industry but he did not. This is the nature of business, this is the mindset of business executives who enjoy little to no regulation and privately laugh at the president and his initiatives the second his back is turned. The steel executives who'd pulled this bait and switch are of the same mindset as the psychopaths who belong to and run the US Chamber of Commerce led by Tom Donohue.

It's impossible for me, anyone fairly conversant in JFK's legacy, to imagine the 35th president making such a gutless speech riddled with delusion and naivete as the one delivered today by Obama before a sworn enemy in the US Chamber of Commerce, an entity that brazenly goes on national television to preach the dubious virtues of outsourcing of American jobs to their overseas plants.

Maybe Kennedy was a little naive in trusting the word of steel executives obsessed with their bottom lines but they never fooled him again. Obama is like Charlie Brown who never learns that the business community will always snatch that football from him at the last second, that they will smile and shake his hand and pat his back in public then go ahead and invest tens of millions more to defeat even his tepid domestic agendas.

Obama played to their patriotism, asking them to join the government in helping to build infrastructure, reminding them that they have a civic responsibility. One can only imagine how many CEO's were either privately or openly smirking when Obama asked them to invest in infrastructure. The closest that Big Business ever got to infrastructure renewal was when Merril Lynch CEO John Thain spent $1.2 million redecorating his office.

And yet, as you will see in the comment section of that WSJ blog post, there are those who still see this corporate kow-tower as a Marxist and wouldbe Socialist dictator. To them I say this:

It's people like them who should wear football helmets until the time to get tucked into bed at night. People like them who continually try to claim that Obama is some "Marxist/ socialist" (God, if ONLY) are simply racists who can't stand the idea of a black man being in the White House and have substituted "nigger" and "coon" with "Marxist" and "Socialist." This man is, if anything, even more pro-corporate than the fucking idiot who came before him, which is saying something. He bailed out Wall Street with virtually no conditions as Bush had, bailed out the automakers without setting any preconditions on them, he's used more war profiteers than Bush ever did and even just appointed that Wall Street scumbag Daley to be his new Chief of Staff just to show the business community that he loves them. The health care "reform" was essentially a massive giveaway, a third bailout, to the giant HMOs and Big Pharma (which contained the additional gift of a secretly-engineered $80,000,000,000 cap on reimbursements) that had no public option, a bill the Chamber spent over $100,000,000 lobbying against.

To call such a tool of the Bilderburg Group a "Marxist" and "wouldbe Socialist dictator" tells me that I just wasted about ten minutes of my life that I'll never get back to racist scumbags who would deny the sky was blue and the grass green if Obama said it was. And they can go fuck themselves and go back to Free Republic and Red State where they belong.

In return for Obama's pleas for more cooperation from a Chamber that is doing its level best to get him out of office (for the wrong reasons), Donohue choked back a laugh of his own and promised to not spend on any money on the next election.

Which is really funny considering the Citizen's United vs the FEC decision that allows the Chamber to spend laundered and fungible funds from multinational corporations in perfect anonymity on right wing candidates. The same right wing candidates on whom they'd lavished $32,000,000 during the 2010 midterms.


Yeah, if I had to deliver that speech, Barry, I'd be choking back a laugh, too.

Kennedy ended his address on the steel strike with these bitter words: "Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer."

And Mr. Obama should get his very soon and will no doubt be very surprised when he realizes that Tuesday brought Big Business as usual.

Funny how government programs look mighty good when it's YOUR programs that are being cut:

Across the country, local governments, nonprofit groups and scores of farmers, to name but a few, are waking up to the fact that when Congress stamped out earmarks last week, it was talking about their projects, too.

Tensions are particularly acute in districts where new conservative lawmakers, many of whom criticized throughout their campaigns the practice of quietly inserting earmarks into spending bills, are coming face to face with local governments and interest groups who were counting on federal dollars to help shore up their own collapsing budgets.

The issue is hardly limited to Republican districts. Democrats, led by President Obama — who recently said earmarks were a bad thing — also agreed to give up the practice. Last week, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee who has long cherished earmarks, announced that they would be banned from this year’s appropriations bills. But he was not happy about it.

“The reality,” Mr. Inouye said, “is that critical needs in communities throughout the country will be neglected: roads and bridges in disrepair, job training programs shuttered, and vital resources for national defense and law enforcement cut off, to name just a few.”

Many citizens, even those who sympathize with cuts in spending, insist that not all pork is cured with the same untoward salt. “I do agree we have to cut from somewhere,” said Steve Tribble, the county judge executive of Christian County in Kentucky, where a planned road project is now imperiled. “I am against some earmarks,” he said. “Not the good ones. I can promise you this is not a road to nowhere.”

Why doesn't Steve Tribble come out and admit that HIS area's spending is good, it's all that OTHER spending in OTHER areas that's bad.

These Tea Party morons have been handed the keys to half the government and they haven't got a freaking clue how things really work. It's idiots who scream about government spending and then fuss when their local program is cut. It's people screaming about keeping the government's hands off their Medicare. It's uninsured people who are opposed to universal coverage. They voted for deficit hawks, and now that they have 'em, they're complaining about cuts.

I have no sympathy for them. They voted for this, let them live with it. It's just a shame that those of us who can put two ideas together have to live with it too.

Labels: American Idiots, earmarks

"Now which would you rather do, hit this Jew over the head with a bag o'sugar, or beat out that rhythm on the drum?"

If you're an old Firesign Theatre fan like I am, you remember that line from Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. And you also remember that when Mrs. Carolyn Pressky took the bag, she found out that it's just a bag of shit.

Well, Arianna Huffington has taken the bag, and now what started out as a progressive news vehicle with actual money behind it (unlike, say, Air America, which was built on Madoff-like illusions and never really recovered), gets to become linked with Great Journalistic Endeavors like Moviefone, PopEater, and the moribund MapQuest. Because Arianna Huffington has sold her media "empire" to the struggling AOL.

Not everything that AOL has had in its stable is crap. I happen to be fond of my local Patch site, which provides daily updates of local news, as well as providing a means for local businesses to promote themselves and local citizens to review them. But as Ken Auletta noted in a recent New Yorker article (subscription required) about AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Patch is costing AOL about $30 million a quarter.

Tim Armstrong, a Google veteran, was just a few weeks ago the Knight in Shining Armor who would save AOL. But with this deal, Huffington gets a ton of power in the merged company (which it appears will suppress the AOL brand in favor of the Huffington brand):

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.

[snip]

While AOL has invested heavily in creating content through enterprises like Patch, the initiative meant to fill the void in areas where struggling local newspapers have cut back on reporting, much of their writing and news gathering is not up to the standards of what consumers get from their traditional news sources.

The Huffington Post, too, has faced criticism over its content, much of which is aggregated from other news sources. But it has started to invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets. By acquiring The Huffington Post’s reporting resources, AOL hopes to counter the perception that it is a farm for subpar content.

“The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,” Mr. Armstrong said.

In that sense, the deal carries a risk for The Huffington Post, which has had none of AOL’s troubles and is widely viewed as a business success with its own unique voice and identity. Now that it is to become part of a large corporate entity, what becomes of that unique character is an open question.

What is also an open question is what direction goeth Arianna Huffington now that she is essentially running a publicly-held company. It's one thing when it's her own show and she can have her friends write about high colonics and veganism. But when she has shareholders to answer to, and given that her own political leanings have tended to be rather fluid depending on the outside influence on her at any given time, it remains to be seen whether the biggest new media outlet that leans away from the batshit-crazy right will still do so.

All of which would leave a wide open door for a particular individual who was rumored last month to be mulling his OWN left-leaning media empire.

Labels: media consolidation

I'm so tired of hearing the Academy Awards show referred to as the "Gay Superbowl" or the "Chick Superbowl." Why should a mediocre football game played by two teams I don't care about (though Green Bay is my pick solely by virtue of being the only nonprofit, community-owned team in the NFL) get to be the point of reference? From now on, Superbowl Sunday is the Testosterone Oscar®s.

The best satire that I've seen on the Hype Machine that is Super Bowl Sunday comes from Wiley Miller of Non Sequitur fame. You'll have to click over to see it so that GoComics doesn't send its lawyers after me, but it's worth the click.

Now everyone knows that if you really don't have a team to root for in this game, there are only two reasons to watch: The commercials, and chicken wings.

Cookie Jill has a nice compendium of memorable Super Bowl ads, but you kind of have to wonder about a country in which millions of people who record programs on their DVRs so they don't have to watch commercials, tune in on this one day a year primarily to watch the commercials. This year, as in most years, car ads dominate, because despite $100 oil, Americans will still go broke to drive a cool car. And I'm sure we can expect the usual odious T&A ads from GoDaddy. And that annoying E-Trade baby, who if he were mine I would suffocate with a pillow to save the world from his future as a hedge fund manager, will also make an appearance.

I'm not sure what the obsession is with the Super Bowl. It can't just be football withdrawal, because fans of non-playoff teams gave up on football weeks ago, and even those of us whose teams fell just a wee bit short are now looking forward to spring and baseball.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps it's just an excuse to have what is essentially a national holiday smack dab in the dead of winter, and who could blame us, the way this winter has been. It's gotten so bad that yesterday we were cheering a cold, raw, rain that all froze up last night -- just because it wasn't snow. They're predicting a bit of snow and rain Monday night, and potentially another big one towards the end of next week. It's enough to make you want them to put Christmas back into March where it belongs, except for those pesky years when Easter is in March, which would just move the Holiday Chocolate Overload three months forward. Of course in March the weather is getting better and you can go outside and walk it off, but it doesn't change the fact that we have at least another month of this. So why not make today a holiday, especially when the Academy Awards are likely to be a snoozefest after the Weinstein Borg's frontal assault of the last few weeks. I enjoyed The King's Speech as much as the next girl, but Best Picture? Really? Doesn't that seem like a lot of trouble to go to in order to give Colin Firth the award he should have gotten last year for A Single Man? I mean, that would be like giving Shakespeare In Love Best Picture to justify giving Dame Judi Dench an award for a few minutes of screen time because you jobbed her on Mrs. Brown the year before.

Oh. Right.

But I digress.

So, since Super Bowl Sunday has become a national holiday to the point that not even the hungriest realtors dare to put on an open house today, it might as well have its own "official" food, and that food seems to be chicken wings.

There's something satisfying about chicken wings out of all proportion to what they are. Part of it is the primal thing about meat on the bone, though one would think that something as small and relatively dainty as chicken wings are hardly the stuff of which macho men are made. If it was only about primal carnivorousness, we would see a rush on turkey legs at the supermarkets this weekend, and you'd see on the news guys with foam rubber cheeses on their heads brandishing turkey legs like jousters and maidens at your local Renaissance Faire. But instead it's chicken wings.

Now, if you don't hold a Super Bowl party, but you feel obligated to participate in the bacchanalia of grease and bone and sauce that is any permutation of chicken wing you like, there is the question of where to find them. This year we haven't had a repeat of the Great Chicken Wing Shortage of 2009, but unless you are having 27 people over, you are stuck with mammoth ten-dollar packages of wings. And so it is here at Casa la Brilliant, where I'm planning to cook up some fake Buffalo wings (which are just going to be baked wings with some Frank's Hot Sauce slathered on at the end) and some teriyaki wings (because I don't much care for hot wings). And then I have to find room in the freezer for the rest.

So what kind of saturated fat-laden treats do YOU make for this dead-of-winter holiday?

Labels: pop culture, Super Bowl

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Ronald Reagan must be the nicest president who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000...1f there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Ronald Reagan is tailored to the image of a friendly fascist. - Robert Lekachman

About the only true good thing that could be said about Ronald Reagan was that he'd retired from the most stressful job in the world with a full head of hair and he didn't do the damage he could've on account of all the naps he took.

Today is Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday and his fascistic followers are celebrating the day with all the pomp, circumstance and money-grubbing alacrity as unabashed fascists celebrate April 20th. You go to any bookstore, there will be the obligatory retrospective hagiographies commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth courtesy of our nation's most premier wingnuts and publishing houses. As with everything else, it's a great opportunity to make money and young college Republicans can now learn through his official biographers how Saint Ronnie of the Jelly Bean nearly completely destroyed middle class families like theirs.

To put it simply, as far as full term presidents go, Ronald Reagan is absolutely the worst, most destructive and dishonest president (George W. Bush would get that top honor if he was actually elected) this republic has ever produced. Under Reagan, the deficit tripled, national defense spending increased, he got a massive wave of tax breaks designed primarily to benefit his wealthy campaign contributors, public education took a rogering, he tried unsuccessfully to take food and milk out of our childrens' mouths at the same time he was giving tax breaks to corporations, more soldiers than ever died for his foreign policy adventurism, he was a coward and cut and ran when terrorists killed 241 of our Marines in Beirut, he cut back room deals with the contras under the fictional guise of combating the Commies, funneled money to them through arms sales to Iran and before he was even elected, sent envoys to talk to Iranian officials and illegally meddling with the hostage crisis under Carter (the all-but-discredited October Surprise which is making a comeback).

In late 1983, he sent another special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld (about to be anointed by CPAC with the Defender of the Constitution Award), to sell Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction and satellite photos of the Iranian army's encampments, thereby resulting in the murders of thousands of Iranians (and Kurdish and Shi'ite Iraqis). But earlier, he made it up to the Iranians by immediately lifting an arms sales ban and brokered a sale of weapons by ex-Mossad gun runners. He flexed his muscles on the beach while in reality doing nothing more than watching the surf crumble the sand castle of Communism then took credit for kicking it down. He overthrew another left wing government under Maurice Bishop by invading Grenada. His "supply side economics" was the forerunner of the unbridled and unchecked greed and capitalism that served as the successful template of the nightmare that ensued under Bush II.

That's just a partial laundry list of what a galactic-class scumbag Ronald Reagan was, a man who demonized the victims of his economic policies and dredged up stereotypes of the welfare queen, used dog whistle politics for racists by announcing his candidacy in a city in which three civil rights workers were murdered just 16 years earlier and smashed one union after another. He stole Jimmy Carter's playbook during that same campaign. His axe man, future jailbird David Stockman, immediately targeted the poor and sickly, immediately eliminating government-subsidized job training such as CETA (resulting in 300,000 suddenly unemployed federal workers) that still hasn't made a comeback. (I guess Reagan took the government underwriting training designed to make people more employable to be the "meddling" that he'd warned us about.)

He not only coddled and protected Noriega, but he even put him on the CIA's payroll and turned a blind eye when Nicaraguan drugs were making their way onto America's streets while having the nerve to appoint an ineffectual "Drug Czar" and his equally clueless wife was saying, "Just Say No!". He coddled and protected Pinochet in Chile until Pinochet's hideous excesses were too much even for Reagan to tolerate (.pdf file). But the ends justified the means because they were our staunch allies in the war on terrorism the dying Communists. He mentioned the word AIDS only once, in 1985, and otherwise pretended the pandemic didn't exist.

And through it all, the Teflon President sailed, smiled and waved through all these scandals like some befuddled old duffer unaware of his family's murderous, chaotic greed and ambition swirling around him. In point of fact, the man's evil was so systemic and so far-flung that we still haven't cataloged what a truly evil man he really was.

Kind of like the guy we have in the Oval Office now. As with Reagan before him, Obama puts a fresh face on fascism, the man who pats you on the back and tells you everything will be alright while his TSA, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and God only knows how many other government goons are frisking the rest of your body. Both men have other things in common, including the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression (Reagan still outshines Obama, as the unemployment rate in 1983 peaked at a whopping 10.2%.) But Obama, friendly fascist though he is, had also had a lot of mud unfairly flung at him and much of it sticks.

He's a Socialist, a Muslim, a fraud who was born in Kenya. He pals around with terrorists. He's bound and determined to hand over 1/6th of our economy into the grasping hands of Big Gubmint. He didn't put his hand over his heart. He's not wearing his flag lapel pin. He disrespected the Office of the Presidency by not wearing his jacket. He muffed a Bible verse. He wants to impose Sharia law on the United States.


And he's a smoker.

All bullshit.

Yet nothing, certainly not the truth, stuck to Reagan thanks to those slick, tailored suits and an endless supply of Brylcreem. He represented to many ignorant people, well-meaning folks and fascists-in-waiting a return to the good old days when he actually had a career in acting, a return to a glorious America somewhere between 40 acres and a mule and Jimmy Carter's sweaters, as if we could actually get that dusty, dog-eared 1955 calendar out of the attic and begin reusing it.

How soon we forgot that those good old days, let's say the 50's, were ones in which, under Eisenhower, the wealthiest paid 90% in taxes, that Reagan was a liberal Democrat who headed up a large union called the Screen Actor's Guild. How fast we chose to forget that by 1962 Reagan had turned from a so-called Democrat to a staunch, union-busting Republican, that he would follow in the footsteps of not Dwight D. Eisenhower but Joe McCarthy. In fact, Reagan's example had not only gone uncriticized, it even spawned a still-famous movement involving petty turncoats who were dubbed "Reagan Democrats." (They've since awakened from their slumber and have switched back.)

12 years of policies ranging from the ruinous to the neglectful ensued and once St. Ronnie was out of office, we all suddenly blinked and rubbed our eyes and wondered where the devastation came from. By 1992, three years after Reagan stumbled back to his California ranch and beginning 12 more years of mistaking his tapioca for hair tonic, 48% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Reagan. Less than a quarter of those polled said we were better off, a bitter counterpoint to Reagan's campaign mantra of, "Can you say you're better off now than you were four years ago?"

But 1992 was almost a generation ago and now The Gipper is making a comeback like another dictator is in his own country.

Yet, in case all this hasn't made an impression on you, let's take a look at the real "Dutch" Reagan, who wasn't really Dutch anymore than he was The Gipper, in this video that was secretly taped at the Oval Office.


Yeah, that about gets it right.

So, here's my idea. In lieu of a minute of silence, let's have a minute of piss while we're standing over or sitting on the toilet and think of Ronald Reagan's grave.

Labels: Ronald Reagan

Last month I posted about an e-mail I'd received from one Todd Bieber, the mastermind of UCB Comedy, who had found a roll of film in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and was looking for the owners. You can see the original post and video about his quest here.

Bieber hasn't yet found the owner of the film, but the video has gone viral with over a million viewers, and he's made a new video as an update:

Imagine a world united by a simple quest to return a lost item to its owner.

Labels: fun stuff, movies

In case you were ever tempted to believe that the Republican Party is still a legitimate political force that just has a different idea of how to get to where we all want to go; that it is NOT just about power, not at all about country, perhaps this will convince you of what an insane clown posse (h/t: jurassicpork) the GOP is:

Senate Democrats appear increasingly nervous that Republicans intend to force a shutdown of the federal government as a political bargaining tool to force deep cuts in the federal budget. A number of Democratic senators have been warning that a federal shutdown could have dire consequences for the U.S. economy, as well as individual Americans would rely on Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and other federal programs.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used Friday’s surprise drop in the nation’s unemployment rate — down to 9 percent, the lowest level since April 2009 — to urge Republicans to focus more on job-creation solutions, not “extreme political stunts.”

“At this critical juncture, we certainly cannot afford an extreme step like forcing a government shutdown that could send us back into a recession and put Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits and border security at risk,” Reid says. “I hope my Republican colleagues will stop playing with fire, and join us to pass responsible measures that control spending while encouraging growth. Now is the time for common-sense solutions that create jobs and strengthen the middle class, not extreme political stunts.”

This year, McConnell describes the March 4 expiration of the continuing resolution currently funding federal operations, and the looming need to raise the federal debt ceiling, as “opportunities” which might spark a fresh federal shutdown.

“Last Sunday, the Republican Leader repeatedly referred to the pending expiration of the CR and the potential breaching of the debt limit as ‘opportunities,’” says Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the Senate. “Shutting down the government and defaulting on our debts should not be considered ‘opportunities.’ Risking millions of American jobs should not be considered an ‘opportunity.’ We need to responsibly deal with the deficit, but we should not put the livelihoods of millions of hard-working Americans in the middle of a game of political brinksmanship in Washington.”

To rein in spending and bring down the deficit, Democrats say Republicans need to drop the extreme rhetoric and support a “responsible, two-pronged approach that cuts waste while keeping our economy growing and creating jobs.”

There is a tiny glimmer of economic hope on the horizon...but Republicans would rather see the economy plunge into recession -- or worse -- if it means bringing Obama down.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, insanity

I'm not sure if I should be glad that I'm still shocked, because it means that I haven't completely sunk into a morass of utter cynicism and hopelessness. But even back before abortion was legal, men who would force women into childbearing weren't so open about their fear and loathing of women -- to the point of articulating that women are simply expendable vessels to be disposed of at will if it means "saving" even an unviable fetus:

The controversy over "forcible rape" may be over, but now there's a new Republican-sponsored abortion bill in the House that pro-choice folks say may be worse: this time around, the new language would allow hospitals to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform the abortion that would save her life.

The bill, known currently as H.R. 358 or the "Protect Life Act," would amend the 2010 health care reform law that would modify the way Obamacare deals with abortion coverage. Much of its language is modeled on the so-called Stupak Amendment, an anti-abortion provision pro-life Democrats attempted to insert into the reform law during the health care debate last year. But critics say a new language inserted into the bill just this week would go far beyond Stupak, allowing hospitals that receive federal funds but are opposed to abortions to turn away women in need of emergency pregnancy termination to save their lives.

The sponsor of H.R. 358, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) is a vocal member of the House's anti-abortion wing. A member of the bipartisan Pro-Life Caucus and a co-sponsor of H.R 3 -- the bill that added "forcible rape" to the lexicon this week -- Pitts is no stranger to the abortion debate. But pro-choice advocates say his new law goes farther than any other bill has in encroaching on the rights of women to obtain an abortion when their health is at stake. They say the bill is giant leap away from accepted law, and one they haven't heard many in the pro-life community openly discuss before.

Pitts' response to the complaints from pro-choice groups? Nothing to see here.

"Since the 1970s, existing law affirmed the right to refuse involvement in abortion in all circumstances," a spokesperson for Pitts told TPM.

"The Protect Life Act simply extends these provisions to the new law by inserting a provision that mirrors Hyde-Weldon," the spokesperson added, referring to current federal law banning spending on abortion and allowing anti-abortion doctors to refrain from performing them while still receiving federal funds. "In other words, this bill is only preserving the same rights that medical professionals have had for decades."

A bit of backstory: currently, all hospitals in America that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding are bound by a 1986 law known as EMTALA to provide emergency care to all comers, regardless of their ability to pay or other factors. Hospitals do not have to provide free care to everyone that arrives at their doorstep under EMTALA -- but they do have to stabilize them and provide them with emergency care without factoring in their ability to pay for it or not. If a hospital can't provide the care a patient needs, it is required to transfer that patient to a hospital that can, and the receiving hospital is required to accept that patient.

In the case of an anti-abortion hospital with a patient requiring an emergency abortion, ETMALA would require that hospital to perform it or transfer the patient to someone who can. (The nature of how that procedure works exactly is up in the air, with the ACLU calling on the federal government to state clearly that unwillingness to perform an abortion doesn't qualify as inability under EMTALA. That argument is ongoing, and the government has yet to weigh in.)

Pitts' new bill would free hospitals from any abortion requirement under EMTALA, meaning that medical providers who aren't willing to terminate pregnancies wouldn't have to -- nor would they have to facilitate a transfer.

The hospital could literally do nothing at all, pro-choice critics of Pitts' bill say.

"This is really out there," Donna Crane, policy director at NARAL Pro-Choice America told TPM. "I haven't seen this before."

Last month job creation was at an anemic 36,000. There is snow in Texas, there are floods and category 5 cyclones in Australia. Arctic ice is thinner than ever before. The Middle East is exploding. One in eight Americans needs food stamps to put food on the table. But all that Republican men care about is that the Evil Daughters of Eve be "punished" by forced continuation of pregnancies that will end up killing them -- so that they can deliver hopelessly deformed babies with no chance of survival. It's not about the babies. It's not about human life and it never was. Because these men do not see women as human. I've asked in the past at what point in the minds of these people when women cease to be human and become mere vessels. We now have our answer: It's always.

UPDATE: Best quote on this comes from, of all people, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs:

According to the “pro-life” GOP, an unborn fetus is a person — but a woman is not.

And there's more, from LGF and elsewhere:

Arkansas Anti-Choicers Reject Abortion Restriction Bill Because it Includes Exceptions for Rape and Incest

South Dakota Seeks to Force Women into Crisis Pregnancy Centers

Kansas House panel considers new abortion limits

And New Jerseyans who didn't think Chris Christie was going to shove his own religious beliefs into your homes, guess again: Abortion rights, in peril in New Jersey

Heh. If the Democrats had the slightest idea how to frame things, they'd call this bill the Human Sacrifice Encouragement Act of 2011.

Labels: abortion, health care, misogyny, reproductive rights, Republican brownshirts

We've been huge fans of Mike Stark ever since he dared to brave George "Macaca" Allen's goons back in 2006. Then there's this...and this. And then there's the time that we were introduced to Mike at Yearly Kos in 2007 where I burbled fannish gibberish like a tween girl who's just realized she's in the same checkout line at Abercrombie and Fitch with Justin Bieber. Because no one is better at being a thorn in the side of Republicans than ol' Mr. Balls of Steel.

I heard this bit on Randi Rhodes' show while driving home this evening, and I should have known it was Stark on the phone:


I think that may be the first time Limbaugh was rendered very nearly speechless.

Labels: bloggers, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh

This year's Blogroll Amnesty Day is a bittersweet one, because it is the first one without the blogger who inspired it all, the late and will-always-be-lamented Al Weisel, a.k.a. Jon Swift. It all began in 2007, when the Big Blue Smurf To Whom I Do Not Link decided to purge his blogroll of all but the "elite" bloggers like himself. How a guy whose idea of blogging is to post "I have a headache" under the title "Afternoon thread" became an arbiter of the elite, generating tons of traffic and comments, is just something we file away under the heading of "Life Ain't Fair." So in Smurfville, blogroll amnesty became just another word for Purging the Kool Kidz Klub of Those Who Are Not Worthy, whereupon the estimable Mr. Swift decided to take back the concept of "blogroll amnesty" the way I have worked to take back the word "fat" and turn it back into a descriptor instead of a value judgment. Hence his -- dare I say it -- liberal blogroll policy.

And so it was that in 2008, Jon Swift joined forces with Skippy and a REAL Blogroll Amnesty Day was born, complete with a slogan: "Look Up, Link Down." Of course the word "down" can also be fraught with judgment, as if the blogs to which we link are but peons to our royalty, but what it's about is for smaller blogs, many of whom boast much better writers and less whoring for attention from politicians, to join together in a spirit of mutual support. Our intermittent features "Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere" and "Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said" are my way of celebrating B.A.D. all year long.

For all that I've been working 7 days a week, 12 or more hours a day since early December, I have had time to check out a few heretofore ignored or nearly-ignored blogs, which I've just added to the blogroll. I must confess that I lack Jon Swift's generosity of spirit, for what I want to see in blogrollees is not a series of posts that simply reprint, or link to, stuff that others write. I want to see WRITING. It doesn't matter if it's about politics, or pop culture, or cats. If the writing is smart, and it's entertaining, I'm there. So in celebration of Blogroll Amnesty Day, and lifting a glass high in praise for Al Weisel, who enriched the lives of so many people who didn't even know him, here are our new blogrollees:

I Was Told There Would Be Bacon (just by virtue of the title)

We Don't Agree, But... (but often we do!)

Liberal Fix (See, Dan? I'm not an ogre after all!)

My Three Cents - by fellow NJ-5 sufferer Adam L, intrepid blogger with one cute kid who somehow manages to write at every blog you can name.

ShortWoman - because we normal-size people have to stick together.

...and at the very last minute...

of mule dung and ash - today's winner of the Ornery Bastard Promising Curmudgeon award.

Cookies in Heaven by that OTHER Jill. If there are cookies in heaven, I am SO there.

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

Just as the Democratic Party exists so that we can delude ourselves that we have electoral choices, Republican women like Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Sarah Palin exist so that conservative women can delude themselves that the men in their party don't hate their guts.

Another shining representative from the "The Bitch Was Askin' For It" Party:

U.S. House Republicans have received a great deal of attention over the past week since seeking to qualify the crime of rape with the term “forcible” in a high-profile piece of legislation. Such a distinction could create classes of rape victims, with “forcible rape” victims somehow being ordained as worse off than victims of statutory rape, date rape, rape by coercion or deception, rape of the disabled or mentally impaired… You get the picture.

But what if rape victims could no longer be referred to as “victims” at all? What if people who have endured this horrible – and already chronically underreported -- crime could only be called “accusers”?

Georgia Republican state Rep. Bobby Franklin (of gold-standard-wannabe fame) has introduced a bill to change the state’s criminal codes so that in “criminal law and criminal procedure” (read: in court), victims of rape, stalking, and family violence could only be referred to as “accusers” until the defendant has been convicted.

Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims. But if you have the misfortune to suffer a rape, or if you are beaten by a domestic partner, or if you are stalked, Rep. Franklin doesn’t think you’ve been victimized. He says you’re an accuser until the courts have determined otherwise.

To diminish a victim’s ordeal by branding him/her an accuser essentially questions whether the crime committed against the victim is a crime at all. Robbery, assault, and fraud are all real crimes with real victims, the Republican asserts with this bill.

(Via Angry Black Lady. And yeah, what she said.)

Labels: assholes, fear and loathing, misogyny, rape

Let's talk about our old friend the Political Compass, where I am a flaming pinko. I've taken this little test a few times and I always come out to the southwest of Gandhi. Naturally, that's a neighborhood I can live with. I'd take his wife a casserole anytime.



Please take this test. Watch out: some of the questions are gibberish:

It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate some criminals.

Trying to rehabilitate the smalltime pot user is a waste of time because he/she shouldn't be a criminal, but please lock up and throw away the key on serial killers. Who wrote this shite?

Charity is better than social security as a means of helping the genuinely disadvantaged.

Apples and oranges. That anyone composed that sentence is a problem all by itself.

Some people are naturally unlucky.

What? What?

Astrology accurately explains many things.

Nothing else explains the AQUARIUS! stickers on my bicycle.

A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.

That is some grade-A political gibberish right there.

First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country.

Can we dig up some Pilgrims and ask them?

Those who are able to work, and refuse the opportunity, should not expect society's support.

Let's say you're a nuclear physicist and you can't find work nuclearly physicisting. Should there be fries with that?

Nonsense aside, after you've taken the test and seen where you turn out on the grid, I'd like you to take it a second time. It's not a long test. What is it, five minutes? The second time, please consider the questions from a different perspective. Chances are good you took the test from a mainstream political perspective in which you get to make some or all of the decisions and some or all of the value judgments. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people in this country do not. So take the test assuming that you might be on the receiving end of those decisions and judgments instead of the delivering end.

Let that sink in. I bet we might actually be neighbors.

Crossposted at Poor Impulse Control.

The Toy Cop
Your ex-spouse just took a US senator and a dozen other people hostage in the most impregnable place in town: The armory. You're a rookie patrol officer and your ex demands to speak to you and you only. His demands: Stop the federal execution of the most notorious child killer since Albert Fish. Have him brought to the armory. In other words: Unreasonable. The FBI can't help you, no one can but a disgraced FBI negotiator struggling with his own demons.

What do you do, especially when the Bureau finds out that your ex is either working in collusion with or accidentally invited in with him the world's most dangerous terrorist, a man who stole 10 canisters of lethal VX nerve gas and plans to use them on thousands of innocents? What do you do when a major television network is manipulating the hostage situation? What do you do when disparate elements seeking their own agenda risk touching off the worst mass murder since September 11th?

What would you do then, rookie?

The Toy Cop is now up for sale on Scribd at the low introductory price of $4.99. When it's available on Kindle, I'll be posting a link to that page, as well.

(Update: The Toy Cop is now available on Kindle.)

In case you're wondering why I haven't written about the situation in Egypt, it's because it's really difficult to work 15-hour days and have enough left of your brain at the end of the day (or in the morning, for that matter) to do cogent analysis of something that isn't my area of expertise. There are any number of people, some of them right here, who can do a far better job than I can of covering a complex situation that requires more analysis than I can do at a bleary-eyed 5 AM. If you're looking for a single source of information in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), you could do worse than checking out Juan Cole, for whom the Middle East IS his area of expertise.

So go ahead, tell me I'm fiddling while Rome burns, but YOU try having 100% accountability for a project with about 30% of the control and 0% of the authority and see if YOU can handle it and then come home and talk intelligently about the future of Egypt.

What I can talk about at this ungodly hour is baseball, particularly the giant flushing sound going on at $iti Field, where the involvement of the Wilpon family in the Bernie Madoff mess becomes uglier every day:

Elyse S. Goldweber, the widow of a former employee of Wilpon’s and Katz’s corporate holding company, Sterling Equities Associates, has charged in a federal lawsuit in New York that the company, Wilpon and two other officers breached their fiduciary duties by offering employees the chance to invest their 401(k) plan with Madoff. By the time Madoff’s scam had been uncovered, about 92 percent of the 401(k) plan had been invested with his fraudulent firm, all of it lost. Goldweber had $280,420 invested in her husband’s 401(k), and it was wiped out, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says that Sterling officers, as overseers of the retirement plan, were required to use “care, skill, prudence and diligence” in administering it, and to diversify investments “to minimize the risk of large losses, unless under the circumstances it is clearly prudent not to do so.” But Goldweber’s lawsuit contends that the officers — two of whom, the suit noted, were certified public accountants — fell far short of honoring that obligation.

The lawsuit, which was filed last summer and covers about an eight-year period starting in 2000, cites example after example of instances in which other individuals and institutions over the years raised alarms about Madoff and his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC.

Moreover, the Goldweber lawsuit noted that Madoff and his wife were investors in Wilpon’s and Katz’s real estate business at the same time Sterling Equities was offering his firm as an option in the retirement plan — something the suit says was never disclosed to employees.

“These reciprocal investments, and the close personal relationship between” the Madoffs “and the Wilpons created a conflict of interest so great that investing with Madoff should never have been an option for a 401(k) participant and likely caused defendants to purposely turn a blind eye to these red flags,” the lawsuit contends.

[snip]

The lawsuit contended that Sterling officers were not only negligent, but also conflicted. Madoff was an investor with Wilpon and Katz, as was his wife, Ruth. Over the years, Madoff and his wife have put millions of dollars into various Sterling entities. The lawsuit said that according to Picard, the trustee in the Madoff case, from the end of 2002 to the end of 2006, for example, funds from Madoff’s firm were used to invest more than $2.3 million in those entities for Ruth Madoff’s personal benefit.

Major League Baseball is a kind of screwy hybrid of private enterprise and public trust. MLB has approval rights over transfers of team ownership, about where and whether clubs can relocate, and a score of other rules. The MLB has essentially a monopoly over professional baseball at the major league level as a result of its antitrust exemption, but there's also this aura of poetry and heritage that always hovers over the sport, for all that other sports seem to have eclipsed it in the public's interest.

But Bud Selig had to have been thinking during his meeting with the Wilpons recently, about the impact on The Business for a franchise in the biggest media market in the country, even the also-ran franchise, to be in this kind of financial mess. Baseball hasn't even recovered yet from the steroid scandal, and now this.

I wrote earlier this week that Fred Wilpon is looking more every day like the Hosni Mubarak of baseball, in that he refuses to leave, he insists that the Mets be HIS family legacy and that the hapless scion Jeff, whose meddling brought the club to its currently appalling state, be the heir, and that Wilpon grandchildren inherit, lo unto millenia. That is why Wilpon, backed into a corner, is making an offer any smart investor would refuse: 25% of the team, none of the profitable SNY network, and absolutely NO say into how the club is run.

Now one could argue that with Sandy Alderson in the front office, the use of the Mets as a shiny toy by a spoiled rich boy is going to be less prevalent than it was during the Omar Minaya years. But there's some question as to whether Alderson was even aware of how bad things were when he took the job, and I have some questions about whether Alderson was sent in to be Bud Selig's Trojan Horse to try to get in there, look at the books, and see just how bad the situation is.

On paper at least, there are the glimmerings of at the very least a fun little ballclub brewing in Flushing. Anthony DiComa of Mets Cetera projects an opening day lineup that looks like this:

C - Josh Thole
1B - Ike Davis
2B - Brad Emaus
SS - Jose Reyes
3B - David Wright
OF - Jason Bay
OF - Carlos Beltran
OF - Angel Pagan
Bench - Chin-lung Hu
Bench - Daniel Murphy
Bench - Scott Hairston
Bench - Willie Harris
Bench - Mike Nickeas

SP - Mike Pelfrey
SP - R.A. Dickey
SP - Jon Niese
SP - Chris Young
SP - Chris Capuano
RP - Francisco Rodriguez
RP - Bobby Parnell
RP - D.J. Carrasco
RP - Taylor Tankersley
RP - Taylor Buchholz
RP - Manny Acosta
RP - Pedro Beato

The pitching is questionable at best -- a top three that can be either brilliant or appalling, depending on which Mike Pelfrey we see, whether R.A. Dickey can repeat his success of last year, and if Jon Niese is ready for the responsibilities of a #3 starter; and a bullpen consisting of maybes (Bobby Parnell), a head case (Francisco Rodriguez), and a bunch of warm bodies.

The team is saddled with Jason Bay for another few years, but if Carlos Beltran can be traded and there's someone in AAA who can move up, you're looking at a young team that at least is going to play hard and not just go through the motions. It's at BEST a third-place team, more likely a fourth, but I'll settle for Positive Signs over the wreckage of the last few years.

But when you have an organization that invested staffers' and players' 401(k) money with a scam artist like Bernie Madoff, and that apparently ignored all signals that something wasn't quite on the up-and-up about him, what kind of free agents are ever going to want to sign with this team? I'm not a fan of assembling a team full of overpaid guys on the down side of their careers anyway, but successful clubs are a mix of young talent and proven veterans who can mentor the kids along. That's what made the Mets of the 1980's successful (until they decided to trade everyone who didn't get along with Gregg Jefferies before realizing it was Jefferies who was the problem).

The Wilpon family may be the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy at this point -- a self-made man in the person of Fred Wilpon whose fatal flaw was trusting his old friend -- et tu Bruté indeed. But the fact of the matter is that the Wilpons will forever be wearing the Scarlet M of Madoff. And it is against the interests of Major League Baseball for them to continue to own a franchise. A 25% sale isn't enough. The entire organization must change hands.

Labels: Baseball, New York Mets

It would be all too easy to confine the failures of the mainstream media to Fox "News", the place where journalism went to die but to any aware news consumer, that would be in itself misleading and unfair. Fox just presents itself as a big, easy target because of their refusal to report the news in a nonpartisan fashion. They're just more unabashedly blatant about it than other networks.

But we've been seeing over the last several decades the mainstream media playing the part of war cheerleaders, the material witness that never seems to be where it's supposed to be to tell the full story. And the failures of the MSM to report the news fully and accurately extends far beyond television. It's also crept into the once-trusted venues of newspaper, magazines and radio.

When we began letting corporations, especially defense contractors and media giants, own networks, the slow but steady destruction of the news was all but inevitable. Eric Boehlert in Lapdogs and Norm Solomon in War Made Easy are two especially damning indictments on the neverending failure of the media to report the news the way it ought to be reported. If the media did their job, we wouldn't need people like Boehlert or Solomon or Media Matters or Newshounds or Buzzflash or... Well, you get the idea.

Every year, someone has to publish a list of the top 10 or 25 news stories that were never or hardly reported on. In fact, it's a book series. TV networks and stations would claim there's only so much news that can be fit into any one news cycle. Yet they utterly fail to explain why the Balloon Boy and Anna Nicole Smith's and Michael Jackson's deaths or Britney Spears shaving her head qualifies as real news and why we shouldn't shove such trash to Entertainment Tonight to make more room for real news.

The incomparable and indefatigable Michael Collins in Egypt and the False Dilemma reminds us of the MSM's latest failure. He begins,

The people of Egypt have had enough of a failed dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. As events unfold, we're seeing a cautionary message entering the corporate media coverage of this event. Having never exposed the dire conditions that prompted the massive protests and demands for change, we're now told that this could negatively impact oil supplies, the stock market, and anti-terror efforts. No foundation for the claims was provided but they're repeated regularly on CNN, the NBC's, Fox, and the print media.

Thus, a false dilemma is created for the public: support the right of people to determine their own fate or protect your safety and the current standard of living, as it were.

Indeed, precious little context is given for the protests in Egypt and Tunisia and next to nothing about those in Jordan and Yemen. The spectacle is everything and if you have enough spectacle, especially when it's tinged with human blood, who needs context?

The overwhelming impression given to the cautious and cynical news consumer is that telling the unvarnished truth about a tyrannical regime with whom the United States and its corporations have longstanding ties is akin to biased, slanted, gonzo journalism. Obviously, that's not true. Despite what faux conservative Stephen Colbert asserts, the truth does not have a liberal bias. As we all know, it's supposed to have no more bias than a mirror.

Plus, over the last several decades, we've seen an uncomfortable reverse mitosis of what used to pass for real, hard news and the infotainment that appeals more and more to the reptilian part of the human brain (most vividly delineated by the Balloon Boy who wasn't in his shiny balloon). It appeals to the curiously peculiar racist American mindset that only cares about missing children, teens, murder victims and runaway brides as long as they're white and good looking.

For every Pat Tillman there are 100 or more LaVena Johnsons. Tillman, a smart, handsome and very white NFL safety, was branded a war hero, one whom the DoD claimed was killed in combat. LaVena Johnson, a young black girl stationed in Balad Iraq, was dismissively ruled a suicide in spite of a mountain of evidence all but proving that she was robbed, beaten, killed and immolated to destroy the evidence.

The mainstream media fawned all over George W. Bush when he pissed and moaned that the worst moment of his so-called presidency was when Kanye West told the truth about him in one of his milder public outbursts: "George Bush doesn't like black people." Meanwhile, the press had long since given up on Susan Lindauer, the first major American casualty of the USA PATRIOT Act, someone who was falsely and illegally imprisoned, persecuted and financially ruined for simply doing her job.

While the press gleefully reported that war criminals Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer were being awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by their crime boss, the aforementioned George W. Bush, they yawned and strenuously ignored the likes of Bunny Greenhouse (who is black), Sibel Edmonds and other whistle blowers for simply doing their job.

While the press gathered around their self-made glitter surrounding Julian Assange, the glamorous international provocateur, they all but had forgotten about Bradley Manning's inhumane treatment. The only reason we know these names is because of the better political blogs, another necessary antidote to a failing mainstream media that puts corporate interests above that of the nation's need to know.

Back in World War Two, we had a word for this kind of misleading, criminal censorship and cherry-picking. It's "propaganda", the kind of thing that Hitler's right hand man Goebbels was responsible for (his official title was even "Minister of Propaganda"). At least the Nazis were up front about what they did and what they were.


You ask Roger Ailes why his network is so biased in favor of the Republican Party, why, he'll quiver his jowls in righteous indignation, call you a liberal rabblerouser and a Nazi and claim that Fox "News" is "fair and balanced."

But the pseudo-intellectual DNA can be traced back to the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and well beyond him. The only difference is Goebbels was more honest, upfront and ballsy about it than his little bastards in latter day American newsrooms.

If you thought you were going to go insane during the storm of the last two days, think of it this way: you could live in Australia:

Australia's Cyclone Yasi, with winds of up to 300 km (186 miles) per hour, is so powerful it could blow apart even "cyclone proof" houses, engineers said on Wednesday.

Yasi is headed for major towns and cities along the northeast coast. It is believed to be the strongest ever to hit Australia, surpassing Cyclone Tracy which largely destroyed the northern city of Darwin in 1974.

"Once you get to extreme cases, you are in uncharted ground and the test data I have got I would not trust it if I had to live there myself," said Dr Robert Leicester, a researcher with the government's national scientific research body.

Leicester, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has studied the impact of Australia's two previous worst cyclones, Tracy and Cyclone Larry in 2006.

"Of the cyclones up to now since Tracy, you have not really had a direct hit on places with a lot of housing," he said.

Building standards have been tightened significantly since Tracy killed 71 people and destroyed about 70 percent of the northern city of Darwin.

But they may be no match for cyclones the size of Yasi. Standards are already being reviewed because of worries that cyclones are getting stronger and moving further south.

Engineers said that while most modern homes were designed to withstand high wind-speeds, pressures were different during a severe cyclone which could suck walls out and blow roofs off buildings.

Structures in the region built before 2002 were designed to withstand winds of 252 kph and those built since then for winds of 265 kph, according to Professor Mark Bradford, of the University of New South Wales' School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Smaller building are particularly vulnerable. "It doesn't look particularly good, it is quite scary."

Labels: weather

In case you haven’t been paying attention or are trying (understandably) to block it from your memory, the annual CPAC conference is going to be at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington from February 10-12th. Among the confirmed speakers:

Rep. Michele Bachmann, Inspiration for the Who’s “suicidal psychopath.”
Gov. Haley Barbour, bloated racist
Hon. John Bolton, group sex-loving psychopath
Andrew Breitbart, lying, racist psychopath
Ann Coulter, anorexic, Islamophobic closet trangender psychopath
Hon. Newt Gingrich, Islamophobic, chronically unemployed psychopath
David Horowitz, Liberals on the campus-fearing psychopath
Sen. Mike Lee, unregulated child labor loving psychopath
Sen. Mitch McConnell, human sawhorse, do nothing racist
Rep. Ron Paul “Please Love Me, Conservatives!”
Sen. Rand Paul Civil rights hating, mountaintop removal loving psychopath
Hon. Tim Pawlenty, Defund ACORN even though they don’t get funds from Minnesota
Gov. Rick Perry, Molly Ivins’ “Governor Goodhair”, secessionist loving psychopath
Hon. Mitt Romney, “Don’t hate me because I mandated health care in Massachusetts.”
Hon. Donald Rumsfeld "We know where they [WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Hon. Rick Santorum, Admitted snuggling dead fetuses years before George W. Bush.
Phyllis Schlafly, Ancient conservative artifact, personal friend of Clare Booth Luce, farts dust
Rep. Allen West, Gun shooting, disgraced Lt. Col of a psychopath

Sounds like the DSM IV come to life, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at some of the scheduled events:

Schedule of Events
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10th
Introduction: David A. Keene, American Conservative Union CONFIRMED
10:00 Secrets to Landing a Conservative Job – Wilson AB

Oh, so only conservatives need jobs, now? And what, exactly, is “a conservative job”? Selling toxic mortgage-backed securities? Holding public office that enables those who sell toxic mortgage-backed securities to get bailed out? Fucking up the ecosystem with utter impunity?

11:00 How Political Correctness is Harming America’s Military – Marshall Ballroom
Elaine Donnelly, Center for Military Readiness CONFIRMED Ilario Pantano, former Marine and author of Warlord: No Better Friend, CONFIRMED No Worse Enemy

Oh here we go again. More pissing and moaning about the repeal of DADT. I wonder if GOProud will attend that panel?

11:00 Iranium – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
Presented by Clarion Fund (1 hour) Explores the dangers posed to the United States and the international community by a nuclear Iran; Followed by Q & A on Iranium.

Iranium! Isn't that clever? Yep, nothing sells like fear, however unfounded and unsupported by intelligence assessments.

1:00 Reagan at 100: Role Model for the Next Generation – Marriott Ballroom
Paul Kengor, author of God and Reagan CONFIRMED
Mark Joseph, producer of Reagan CONFIRMED
Brodi Conover, Reagan Centennial Youth Committee CONFIRMED
Craig Shirley, author of Rendezvous with Destiny CONFIRMED

A role model for the next generation of hypocrites, or how a former liberal Democrat who was the president of a large union became a rock-ribbed, union-busting Republican when it became politically expedient, someone who railed against “socialized medicine” then became a beneficiary of it from 1981 until his death.

Yeah, they sure know how to pick their role models, don’t they? I’m amazed there isn’t a scientific panel discussing ways to reanimate Reagan’s rotting corpse so they can trot him out in 2012.

Moderator: Kate Obenshain, Young America’s Foundation CONFIRMED
1:00 Rep. Steve King (IA) – Marshall Ballroom CONFIRMED
Introduction: Kayne Robinson, National Rifle Association CONFIRMED
1:00 Blogger Lunch with Citizens United Productions – Delaware Ballroom
President David N. Bossie & short video presentation: David v. Goliath: The One Year
Anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

What they seem to forget during their celebration of the SCOTUS selling our elections to the highest corporate bidder is that when the GOP falls out of favor with corporations, they’ll inevitably start flooding the Democrats with their billions.

1:00 Hon. Newt Gingrich – American Solutions Booth
Book Signing – To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine; Valley Forge:
George Washington and the Crucible of Victory, among other titles.

The book title says it all. The Wall Street-coddling, corporate-friendly Obama is a secular Socialist. Right. I suppose next you’ll be telling me he’s Muslim and was actually born in Kenya and… oh, wait…

1:15 Policy Recommendations for Real Immigration Reform – Marshall Ballroom
Secretary of State Kris Kobach (KS) CONFIRMED
Jayne Cannava, Pro-English CONFIRMED
Dino Teppara, Indian American Conservative Council CONFIRMED

Conservative Indians?! Is there actually any such thing? What are they going to arrive in, a Miata?

Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies CONFIRMED
2:00 Hon. Rick Santorum – Marriott Ballroom CONFIRMEDIntroduction: Foster Friess, Jackson, WY CONFIRMED 2:00 America At Risk: The War With No Name – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom Live introduction by co‐hosts Newt and Callista Gingrich (1.5 hours)

“Getcher fear right here, get it while it’s hot!”

2:30 Traditional Marriage and Society – Marriott Ballroom
Tom Minnery, CitizenLink CONFIRMED
Bishop Harry Jackson, Hope Christian Church CONFIRMED
Michel Faulkner, author of Restoring the American Dream INVITED
Moderator: Carrie Lukas, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to CONFIRMED

“Getcher fear of the teh gays right here, get it while it’s hot!”

3:00 Your Guy Won. So What? Holding Conservatives’ Feet to the Fire – Wilson AB
Sponsored by the Leadership Institute

Note no one from the mainstream media will be at that one.

4:00 Two-Minute Activists – Marshall Ballroom
Ryan Hecker, Houston Tea Party Society CONFIRMED
Ana Puig, Kitchen Table Patriots CONFIRMED
Deneen Borelli, Project 21 CONFIRMED
Catherine Engelbrecht, King Street Patriots CONFIRMED
Gena Bell, OH CONFIRMED
Burnell Bailey, ME CONFIRMED
Darcy VanOrden, UT CONFIRMED
Katie Kieffer, Blogger CONFIRMED

More like the Two Minutes Hate.

Moderator: Amy Frederick, 60 Plus Association CONFIRMED
4:00 Presentation of Defender of the Constitution Award – Marriott Ballroom
Presenter: Brad O’Leary and David A. Keene
Recipient: Hon. Donald Rumsfeld CONFIRMED

This Bizarro World. In Bizarro World, Donald Rumsfeld get Defender of Constitution Award. In Bizarro World, Obama also get Nobel Peace Prize and Paul Bremer get Preznitdential Medal of Freedom Award.

6:30 C4L Reception w/ Ron Paul & Rand Paul – Wilson AB
Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty (1.5 hours)
Appetizers and Open Bar
Open to Campaign for Liberty Sponsors Only
7:00 Perfect Valor – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
A patriotic salute to Iraq war heroes, narrated by Sen. Fred Thompson (1.5 hours)

If you fought in Afghanistan, meh. Fuck you. But if you fought in Iraq without adequate armor, got wounded and flown to a slum named Walter Reed then was blamed for your nightmarish living conditions, we salute you! That is, if we can keep Fred awake long enough.

9:00 Rediscovering God In America I & II – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
Citizens United Productions’ Double Feature

I already rediscovered God. I found him loitering at the AF Academy at Colorado Springs.

9:30 The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary – Marshall Ballroom
Dan Pero, American Justice Partnership CONFIRMED
Timothy Lee, Center for Individual Freedom CONFIRMED
Ken Klukowski, American Civil Rights Union CONFIRMED
Moderator: Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Institute CONFIRMED

Oh, yes. Liberal judicial activists. Not to be confused with neoconservative judicial activists who elect presidents through conflict of interest, get involved in the 2nd Amendment and sell our electoral system to the corporations with the most cash.

There’s 11 more pages of this shit but I’m sure you get the message by now. This is going to be just another fear fest starring the usual suspects, crooks, liars, psychopaths, bigots and hypocrites. If you live in the DC/Virginia area, be somewhere else that weekend in case crazy got communicable.

Labels: enough already, FUBAR, icepick meet forehead, weather

The Enquirer was right about John Edwards after all, wasn't it?

Labels: hypocrisy, It's OK if You're a Republican, John Boehner, Washington scandals

I suppose I really should weigh in on the New York Mess -- not the storm, but the baseball organization in Flushing, which is looking more like a fitting location for part of the Wilpon empire every day. I haven't yet, mostly because I am just too damn busy trying to get a project out the door (and falling flat on another one that I just didn't have time to do, which no doubt will reflect on my annual review, but I'm not sure how much more time I can put into work when I am going full-bore seven days a week since early December anyway.

But all that aside, Fred Wilpon are starting to look like the Hosni Mubarak of New York, insisting that his family retain full control of the New York Mets in perpetuity while expecting someone else to sink a couple hundred million into an organization which was so deeply intertwined with Bernie Madoff he might as well have changed his last name to Wilpon.

But in the face of this utter clusterfuck in Flushing, there's one gleam of light in the person of an erudite 36-year-old knuckleballer who is in no way affiliated with Scott Boras and recognizes what a boon even a modest multiyear contract is for a player. Fred Wilpon could learn something from R.A. Dickey:

“I’ve played on 14 one-year contracts, none of which have been guaranteed, so when the opportunity arose to have some financial security from a financial standpoint and also feel like I was treated fairly not only by the New York Mets as an organization, but also the city, it made it very easy for me to want to return for more than just next year.

“My goal at this point is to be the best bargain in baseball for the next three years. That’s my goal. To win championships, you really have to have an altruistic approach, in that I wasn’t out to break the bank from the get-go and I know that if I want to be part of the solution here, which I do, giving some things up, so to speak, might help the collective good, and I was willing to do that for this organization and still am.’’

Labels: New York Mets

I know that you'll all sleep easier tonight knowing that the new Teabagger Congressional freshmen get their publicly-financed health insurance today. And what a lovely policy it is, too, as Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT 2nd) reveals:

Today, Republican Members of Congress who ran on a platform of repealing health care and patients' rights for millions of Americans officially began receiving their own Congressional health insurance. Just two weeks after their party voted unanimously to strip patient protections and affordable coverage for all Americans, all but 15 new Republican members of the 112th Congress are enrolled in a comprehensive insurance plan. Their plan is paid for with generous subsidies courtesy of the American taxpayer, and has no waiting period for pre-existing illness or disability.

Beginning today, a new Republican Member of Congress with high blood pressure, diabetes, or any chronic condition is immediately covered at the same premium cost as 8 million other federal employees. The same is true for his or her spouse and dependent children, regardless of age, gender or prior illness.

That would not be the case for millions of Americans if the GOP health care repeal bill becomes law. For 129 million men and women under the age of 65 who have pre-existing conditions, repeal of the Affordable Care Act would spell the end of protection from price and coverage discrimination that newly-covered Republican Members of Congress now enjoy.

If the Republican repeal bill were to become law, 1.2 million young Americans between ages 22 and 26 who just became eligible to stay on their parents' insurance plans will be cut loose again and sent back to the ranks of the uninsured.

But my new Republican colleagues would keep theirs.

If the Republican repeal bill were to become law, patients with costly chronic conditions like, cancer, hemophilia and ALS would again be subject to lifetime and yearly limits on coverage. Millions of Americans struck by catastrophic illness or injury would again find themselves exposed to loss of home or bankruptcy. For our family, friends and neighbors, peace of mind would be gone.

But again, my new Republican colleagues would keep theirs.

If the GOP repeal bill were to become law, 4 million small business owners would see their 2010 taxes increase by thousands of dollars each year. The Affordable Care Act included tax credits starting this year to provide relief to small employers who pay much higher premiums than large firms.

Despite the blatant cost increase repeal would force on job-creating small businesses across the country, my new Republican colleagues themselves would not pay a penny more.

Your tax dollars at work, folks. Does YOUR right-wing Congressman accept this insurance while voting against YOUR right to have this kind of coverage? Mine does.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy

Randi Rhodes had an interesting phone call yesterday, from a woman who started out asking why "we" let it get so bad in Egypt, and then under pressure from Randi, decided that what she wants is "a good election", by which she clearly meant 'ZOMG NO MUSLIMS!!" It was so painfully obvious, and yet this woman insisted in couching the fear that the Talking Heads of Television have been whipping up into concern trolling about elections.

When you take out of the equation this business about how the U.S. has a right to demand that someone we like lead Egypt because Israel needs it this way, the only conclusion you can come to is that people in Egypt have had enough of a government that only represents he oligarchs and the moneyed and have discovered that there really IS people power when there is common cause. Egypt differs from the U.S. in that here, Fox News has managed to convince a smallish but vocal group of people that giving more power to corporations, and allowing corporations to buy politicians in the government, and to have government be for sale, is a GOOD thing. Remember, this is a country where guys who have seen their jobs disappear are sending death threats to a 78-year-old academic who only "crime" is telling them to organize. That's the power of media in the United States.

So here we are with a two-party system that consists of a party of gutless whores and a party of batshit crazy lunatics. We have a car thief and possible arsonist collecting dossiers on anyone who questions the government, presumably so he can both monitor the American citizenry AND the Democratic (presumably only Democratic) administration they might petition. We have a Republican Congress whose first priority is redefining rape. And then we have so-called "Democrats" like Stephen Lynch, who thinks that conservodems like himself are the future and the rest of us should shut the hell up and get with the program:

Liberal groups need to stay out of Democratic primaries if the party is going to retake the House majority, according to a conservative Massachusetts Democrat.

Rep. Stephen Lynch was one of several Democrats who faced an aggressive primary challenge from the left in 2010. His challenger Mac D'Alessandro, a former top official with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), received almost $300,000 from labor groups for his campaign.

[snip]

Clearing primaries for members and discouraging liberal groups from spending against incumbents should be a priority for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he said. “It would definitely help, I think. You need to talk to those groups.”

(via)

And having money-grubbing politicians tell us to go away, to shut up, to not have a right to air OUR grievances differs from a despotic government, how? Don't talk to me about dictators and how this is just a Congressman and how we can still vote for other candidates in primaries. The minute party politics, whether Democrat or Republican, trumps the right of the citizens to gather peacably in the form of grassroots campaigns for election challengers, and when the party makes the rules and controls the money, we HAVE lost democracy.

The teabaggers have one advantage that the progressive side of the fence does not -- a corporate media and corporate astroturfers plowing money into their efforts. This works as long as the teabaggers continue to put their energies into defense of the corporate state under the false doctrine of Rich People Create Jobs® On our side of the fence, we have blogs and what's left of MSNBC in the evening (where ratings have fallen since the Olbermann sacking, largely because MSNBC alienated much of its audience with this move...probably deliberately, so they can return to the golden age of Savage Nation and Alan Keyes is Making Sense). The teabaggers are dancing to the tune of their corporate masters. The left is still cats resisting being herded. And the party that's supposed to be a counterbalance to the likes of John Boehner being the guest of honor at insurance company dinners and passing out checks on the House floor is telling us to suck it up and stick with the status quo.

We ought to be taking a really good, close look at Egypt. Because what's going on there is what happens when people get their act together and realize that it is their own government that's working against them.

Labels: Blue Dog Democrats, political hackery, Revolution in Egypt