If, in actuality, Obama does suck without a teleprompter (he doesn’t, he is a magnificent speaker with or without one), wouldn’t that make him Reaganesque?
Consider this an open thread.
by John Cole| 65 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
If, in actuality, Obama does suck without a teleprompter (he doesn’t, he is a magnificent speaker with or without one), wouldn’t that make him Reaganesque?
Consider this an open thread.
Comments are closed.
Grand Moff Texan
I PAID FOR THIS TELEPROMPTER!!!
.
Ninerdave
Great book:
Gang Leader For a Day
Couldn’t put it down and finished it in one day.
Mr Furious
The FISA Court and statute is no longer the EXCLUSIVE governing authority for how surveillance can be conducted in America. It’s wide fucking open now.
Oh, and telecoms get immunity.
Fucked over retroactively and going forward. Nice job Reid and the rest of you fucking clowns.
And a special “Fuck You!” to Hillary for making sure she got a 21-day jump on her Texas sandbag wall and skipping the vote altogether.
Zifnab
We can always pray that the House smacks it down. They’ve got their own FISA Bill on the table – the RESTORE Act – so it would be nice if at least one branch of Congress showed some balls.
I’m not really expecting much, but its nice to dream. We’re not quite screwed yet.
Jen
FWIW (not very much), internet petition to the House on this bill…
cleek
shorter Dems: Nader was right: there is no difference.
ThymeZone
One thing you can say about Reagan: He always hit his mark.
TheFountainHead
Not something you can always say about Cheney.
/shiteatinggrin
Jen
Also Reaganesque, appeal to the opposing party. Two Obamacans just in this story.
Billy K
I was over at The Great Orange Satan, being pissed off at the FISA/immunity vote today, and somewhere in the comments someone linked to this.
I’ll be damned if it doesn’t explain exactly (it was written in 2005) how Obama and the MUP are drawing and speaking to these immense crowds. But more importantly, it goes into detail about how this isn’t just bipartisan compromise for the sake of compromise – it says how Liberals haven’t been pushing hard enough and haven’t been getting anything out of compromises.
Basically, he’s saying it’s time to shift the Overton Window back to the left by engaging the “other side,” and I’ll be damnded if that’s not exactly what he’s doing right now.
Oh, and also he penned the piece himself. It’s a wonder to read. (Yes, the MUP got glitter in my eyes today.)
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Anybody concerned about human rights may want to look at this:
h/t Sully
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
From govtrack.us
Jersey represent!
Schumer did as I told him. Good boy. You get to keep my vote.
Clinton, yet again, spineless as always.
I bet Obama was spineless, too.
Hrmmmm…
Come-on, empty. Gimme some spin.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Errg, sorry about the formatting guys. Lets try that again:
The Other Steve
Ah ha! Our secret MUP plan is finally unveiled by a 2005 post.
Ride the Magical Unity Pony! RIDE!
calipygian
Dean Barnett is a fucking idiot who has no idea what the fuck he is talking about. I saw Obama speak at a Jim Webb rally a few years ago and the lesson I took away was, when running for office, don’t let Obama campaign for you because when you get up on stage, the paramedics will be rushing up there looking fora pulse.
Webb looked like a tree stump after Obama got done.
I wish Obama had the chance to run against Bush. Obama would have sent Bush back drooling, to play with his Legos, Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels or what ever the fuck Bush does in his spare time. Falling off Segways, I guess.
Dennis - SGMM
Here’s the Roll Call on the Dodd Amendment to strip telco immunity from the FISA Act. Most of the votes were predictable – with the exception of Jim Webb who voted “Nay.” That took some of the shine off of his halo for me.
As mentioned above, Hillary did not vote. No big deal, it wasn’t that important – eh, Hils? Gotta’ keep that telco money coming in. Besides, I hear that the HMS Clinton remains caught on a sandbar so the good Senator from New York is probably busy rearranging the deck chairs.
wasabi gasp
Obama may be the shit with or without a telepromter, but Bush would blow him away in a earpiece/batterypack-off.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
Billy K,
Thank you, so much, for posting that piece. I just recently started poking around Kos, and would have totally missed this.
srv
The War in Berkeley begins.
Z
That is just disgraceful. As if the Marines don’t have enough to deal with already.
Punchy
Shorter Obama: I cant haz werd masheen?
Dennis - SGMM
Ah, The People’s Republic of Berkeley. When I went to school there in the Sixties the students were the freaks and the City Council was straight. Now I hear it’s the other way ’round.
Z
I would assume its because those same student got older and joined the city council.
Teak111
Nay on the Dodd amendment, Christ. Fucking Feinstein is done in Cali. That is it!
Face
Because it’s always a reasonable response to a city council vote to fuck over school children and the safety of the state’s law enforcement.
Jen
Yes, thanks Billy K. That man is teh awsum. It gives me the giggles just to think about what Bush would post to a right-wing blog.
Billy K
Yep. That hurt. I don’t donate a lot. You really have to be “special” to get my dough, but Webb got more from me in 2006 than anyone. He’s generally been a good Senator (from what I’ve seen), so I guess this is his mulligan; but damn…
Dug Jay
That’s an interesting story out of Berkeley, srv.
As somebody once observed, “It sometimes seems as if God had tilted the United States in such a way as to cause all the loose nuts to roll across the country and settle in Berkeley, California.”
The Other Steve
This is pretty pathetic on both sides. I don’t understand why the military would be out protesting. Seems like they don’t have enough to do or something.
The Other Steve
He might get 25 responses on redstate of “Mega ditto!”
Rudi
The Wingnuts looked at McClowns kitchen counters and found that Soros Construction poured the concrete.
Bad Soros
Really bad Soros
Soros Unhinged
Zifnab
It doesn’t look like the military was out protesting. A few little old ladies with walkers and their grandparents’ war memorabilia and a bunch of other middle-aged hippie women, but that’s about it.
That said, Dreggas and TZ and a few of the other locals have been asking for the torches and pitchforks to come out against this travesty of a war. There’s your torches. There’s your pitchforks. I’m not complaining. Heck, if Berkley wasn’t a thousand miles away, I’d be happy to join them. At this stage of the game, the military can hold the Iraq bag with the rest of us. Recruiting offices will get no pity from me.
binzinerator
Fixed to acknowledge his role as the leading confidence man in the big conservative con.
jcricket
Is it wrong to want to vote for Hillary to see Andrew Sullivan throw a fit? (or a bigger fit than he is throwing now)?
Not that I already haven’t, but when can Sullivan be thrown in with the rest of the right-wing morons? He’s as irrelevant as Buckley, as shrill as Hitchens (and as British) and as racist as, I dunno, a lot of Republicans.
Is it that he’s gay and writes 40,000+ word imepenetrable prose-style blog posts that get people to “take him seriously”?
jcricket
Really? I like to think of America somewhat as a toilet bowl, with the south being the slightly tilted to the right bottom of the bowl where all the shit flows down to.
Jake
If you get your water from Lake Mead, you might want to stark stockpiling aqua and ammo.
gypsy howell
Jim Webb can go fuck himself. Wasn’t he supposed to be one of those “more and better democrats?” Once a republican, always a republican, I guess.
I pity the next democratic fundraiser who calls me…
And Billy K – this aint no golf game. No mulligans.
Bubblegum Tate
When I first moved out to Oakland, I had a coworker who had been a Berkeley freak in the ’60s. The way he explained it actually made a lot of sense: “If your parents were a bunch of left-wing freakout hippies, what are you gonna do for your teenage rebellion? Smoke weed and listen to protest music? Hell no, you go the exact opposite direction of your parents–which means becoming a right-wing square.”
chopper
bill must have had surgery today.
Billy K
Who takes him seriously? Who?
I’ll admit he’s a good writer; he just has no real ideas and no core convictions from what I can tell. He’s a leaf in the wind.
(Honestly, I think it’s just his accent that keeps him on TV.)
curtadams
Hill not showing had no effect on the final cloture – no vote is the same as nay on cloture. However, she *did* endanger Feinstein’s amendment. Feinstein got 57 Ayes. Had Hillary been there two more votes (always a possibility, especially when it’s likely the next President is voting for it) would have passed it.
Billy K
Well…he was supposed to be our only chance of taking a seat in Virginia. He’s been pretty good up til now. Better than I expected for a Reagan cabinet member. I don’t want to turn my back on the guy for one….OK, yes I do. Kinda like Biden’s vote for the bankruptcy bill. Some things are just hard to forgive.
Oh wait – didn’t Clinton vote for that, too?
sparky
myiq=pie:
Glad to see that those 35 years of experience paid off for Clinton today. She really showed the GOP, didn’t she? Nothing like not voting! Really ran the table against those evil Rs, not like that silly Obama who actually foolishly voted against Georgie. Nice.
PS: AT&T called. They said you can turn off the megaphone now. Oh, and stop making those other calls, too. They said you’d know the ones they were talking about.
jcricket
Maybe it’s gay affirmative action? Or the secret homosexual lobby/cabal. Wouldn’t that be all ironical and what-not for Mr. Log Cabin to be propped up by affirmative action?
Basically I stopped reading Sullivan when he turned into an endless accelerating loop: Bears + Windows + CDS + CDS + 40,000 word essay on Burke (repeat)
Zifnab
Yes, yes. And Obama co-sponsored a bill that myiqsomethingsomething says was just as bad, if not worser and to the max. The Bankruptcy Bill is perhaps one of the defining bullshit moments of our time and I’m confident it will be one of the most far reaching legislative acts under El Presidente BushHitler.
jcricket
This was a bad one, although it has the positive unintended effect of making it more likely people will walk away from their homes (jingle mail) b/c they can’t walk away as easily from their credit cards.
Score a teensy victory for the little guy in the “be careful what you wish for” category.
Reading about how pay-day lenders (who already hose the military and minority/poor folks) are now going after barely-eking-it-out retirees and co-opting their SS checks with the help from banks makes me literally sick to my stomach. That we still allow these companies to be in existence and don’t moderate the near-debtors-prison like impacts banks are having on our nation is just fricking mind-boggling.
jcricket
Oooh wait. Patriot act trumps Bankruptcy bill. Medicare Plan D is close, but can actually be fixed (let government negotiate with pharma, duh! Get it paid for, duh!), unlike the other turds I mentioned, which are faulty by design.
Zifnab
Nah. The Patriot Act screwed over a handful of people a whole bunch. But Joe Average was left virtually untouched (if you’re not doing anything wrong… we won’t bother you). The Bankruptcy Bill had the delightful impact of dicking over anyone who screws himself financially. I bet if you line up all the people that get locked in the debt trap and all the people who’ve been Patriotized, the debtors will outnumber the alleged terrorists fifty fold.
srv
Ah, latest virals. Watch Baltimores finest assaulting some 14 year olds
Jake
Andrew Sullivan. SA2SQ.
SP
jake tapper is a punk ass
jcricket
Yeah, in the tactical sense the bankruptcy bill f-s over a whole bunch more Americans. But in a strategic sense, massively expanding the governments powers to spy, esp. without warrants or oversight, affects us all negatively, in really bad ways, long term.
jcricket
So Andrew’s like Tyler Perry? Andrew Sullivan stars in this year’s breakout smash: Andrew Sullivan Presents Andrew Sullivan’s Andrew Sullivan gets married. Starring Andrew Sullivan. Written & Directed by Andrew Sullivan. Produced by Christopher Hitchens.
Digital Amish
Don’t underestimate the importance of Texas.
Michael D.
Is it just me, or does anyone get a little embarrassed about seeing things like “Results for Born-Agains/Evangelicals” on major broadcast discussion of exit polls. I don’t think you see shit like that in any other Western country. You just know people in other countries roll their eyes.
Dennis - SGMM
Darn tootin’. Doing what might help you get elected versus doing what’s right has never been a dilemma for Hillary.
jcricket
I didn’t see anyone post this gem from Erik at Redstate
capelza
He really is getting sleazy (sleazier I suppose) isn’t he?
Dennis - SGMM
That Erick’s a knee-slapper all right. I wonder how he explains why the red states get more back from the government than they pay in taxes while exactly the opposite obtains in the blue states.
Randy Paul
If, in actuality, Obama does suck without a teleprompter (he doesn’t, he is a magnificent speaker with or without one), wouldn’t that make him Reaganesque?
Only if Michelle had to complete his sentences like Nancy did with Ronnie.
Jake
Hot tea + Sinuses = Owch.
Alarmingly accurate (but bad for the sinuses). The only difference: I don’t think Drew would make a convincing woman.
I kinda suspect Drew would rather set his back hair on fire than put on a dress.
myiq2xu
He gave new meaning to the term “acting President.”
Jake
Sounds like his fund raising efforts aren’t going so well.
Erick has kids? And a job??
Mind = Boggle.
TenguPhule
That would the Bush Ranch the annoying clog at the bottom of the pipe then?
TenguPhule
That would make even.