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Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Just wonderin', is all
Posted by Jill | 5:16 AM
Let me see if I have this right: investors are fleeing stocks because Standard & Poors downgraded U.S. debt, and they're moving their money into....U.S. Treasury bonds.

And these are the people to whom we trust our retirement savings?

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Friday, October 29, 2010

Here we go...
Posted by Jill | 7:13 PM
Just to show that my cynicism knows no party, I find it fascinating that all of a sudden we have bomb materials allegedly coming into this country just as the TSA is rolling out full-body scanners at Newark Airport -- a place I'm going on Sunday. (For the record? I'll take the pat-down, thank you very much. When you have hospitals who have trained staff who can't get the radiation dosage right in CT scans, do you really want to trust your health a bunch of semi-skilled TSA agents with a radiation-emitting machine? I don't.)

But assuming all this is NOT utter horseshit (and that may be a big assumption), after reading some of the breathless coverage of "The Thwarted Terrorist Attack™", I figured I'd take a gander around among the denizens of wingnuttia and find out how they were going to invert the situation such that a warning of an attack paid heed by a black Democratic president and thwarted puts us at peril, while a warning ignored by a white Republica president who doesn't want to be bothered while on vacation and which results in the deaths of 3000 people is somehow keeping us safe.

Of course the first place one goes when embarking on such an adventure of wading into this fetid cesspool is the endorser of the murderous Ilario Pantaro, Little Pammy Geller, who does not disappoint, claiming that "Obama is very much part of the problem." (I guess because he actually worked to stop the thing, unlike her Texas dimwit hero.)

Over at Lucianne.com, commenters who would call anyone crazy who believed in the Reagan "October Surprise" are already insisting this is one.

Liz Cheney is already out there blaming Obama. At the same link, Donald Douglas is confused because Obama is calmly informing the public instead of sitting like a deer in the headlights in a third-grade classroom and then flying all over the country all day. For this bunch, thwarting a terrorist attack makes you weak, but allowing one to happen and then talking tough makes you a tough guy. Calmly assessing a situation makes you weak, running around like a chicken without a head is toughness. That is Republican Reality -- the kind of reality that used to be limited to crazy street people and that guy who used to post ads in the Village Voice who claimed that he was killed by alien death rays and replaced by a CIA double.

Oddly, the Freepers aren't even on this yet. I guess they aren't as ingenious as Pammy in coming up with ways to argue that stopping an attack makes you a traitor while sitting by while one plays out makes you a hero of Outer Wingnuttia.

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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Impotent Old Men
Posted by Jill | 5:07 AM
No, I'm not talking about the Vatican this time. I'm talking about the Three Stooges of Faux Toughness, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom are every day that the story of the New York car bomb develops resembling more and more the old Al Franken/Tom Davis SNL sketch in which two politicians run ads trying to outdo each other on how tough on crime they'll be. It ends with one ad which has the candidate saying, "We'll kill 'em BEFORE they can commit a crime."

You have to wonder about guys like these three -- two Sore Losermen and a closet case -- and oh, hell, let's throw Dick Cheney in there too while we're at it, who have this hard-on for torture and for eviscerating due process and the Constitution in the name of "toughness" and "strength." Their "strength" is that of the schoolyard bully who still has to wear a diaper in bed at night. Where "strength" became equated with running around like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming "OMYGODTHETERRORISTSARECOMING WE'REALLGONNADIEOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!", I have no idea. But somewhere along the line, Republican politicians decided that there way hay to be made among residents of towns in flyover states that have a near-zero risk of actually being the target of a terrorist attack by keeping them in a constant state of fear. Lieberman is a particularly heinous example of this, and he's not even a Republican (though he might as well be). It's appalling that a Jewish politician whose sole concern in regard to terrorism often seems to be the safety of Israel, a country founded to assuage Western guilt about looking the other way while Hitler massacred Jews, would advocate summary stripping of citizenship and presumable deportation if the government doesn't like the crowd with which you hang out. Given the flexible government definition of terrorism in this country, which does not seem to include nurderers of women's health practitioners and white guys who want to overthrow the government, I'm not sure we can trust politicians to decide who should retain citizenship and who shouldn't. We are all Emma Goldman now.

That these guys are continuing to beat the waterboarding-and-torture drum, while Faisal Shahzad is singing like a canary even AFTER having his Miranda rights read, just shows that for them, the whole Bushian torture-and-military-tribunal thing isn't about our safety, it's about a bunch of impotent old men being able to feel that they can still get it up.

Once again, Rachel Maddow debunked the efficacy of this model, which may make John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham feel like Biggus Dickus, but is actually a less effective way of dealing with suspected and actual terrorists than the law enforcement model they deride:


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Friday, January 23, 2009

Jon Stewart takes on Chicken Little
Posted by Jill | 11:40 PM




I know that I am an adherent to the Size Acceptance/Health at Any Size doctrine, but in Rush Limbaugh's case I'm willing to make an exception. He really has put on a few tons, hasn't he?

(h/t)

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Joe Scarborough Rubber Room Watch: Day One
Posted by Jill | 9:14 PM
Grab the popcorn, and watch David Shuster smack down Joey "The Scar" DeadInternInHisOfficeAndThenHeQuitCongress this morning:





And this delicious smackdown by Sir Keith from last night (listen carefully about 26 seconds in; Keith says "Jesus, Joe, why don't you get a shovel?"):





Hey, MSNBC? Marc Maron would rant a hell of a lot more intelligently and be a hell of a lot funnier, for probably half of what you're playing Joey the Scar.

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