Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

So cool that a Black prosecutor nailed his ass.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

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Archives for July 2008

Experience You Can Believe In

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The newest line of attack:

A leading surrogate for John McCain called Barack Obama “frighteningly inexperienced” Tuesday, the latest effort from the Arizona senator’s presidential campaign to step up its criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate while he travels abroad.

Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Rep. Heather Wilson, R-New Mexico, sharply criticized Obama and his presidential campaign for suggesting the Iraqi government had endorsed his timetable for withdrawal from the war-torn country.

Aside from the fact that she is just wrong or lying about the iraqi government, let us take a look at the kind of experience Heather Wilson brings to the table:

Rep. Heather Wilson has long been among the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress, eking out wins in a Democratic-leaning New Mexico district because of her independent reputation and persistent campaigning.

She now faces a new challenge to her future as well as her reputation: involvement in a growing political tempest over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department.

Wilson acknowledged Monday night that last October she contacted then-New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to inquire about the pace of a corruption probe against the state treasurer, a Democrat. But she firmly denied calling to pressure Iglesias to speed the indictment process.

The real Republican experience- being crooked from top to bottom, from the former Keating Five candidate to the surrogates who speak for him.

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Plagiarific!

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It’s good to see that the crack art department at Vanity Fair is brilliant enough to come up with its own original ideas! See this from a week ago.

Spoof McCain Vanity Fair cover

….and isn’t the protrusion on the left side of McCain’s face? If you’re gonna do satire, shouldn’t it at least be funny (and not “last week”)? And what’s with the fist bump? Wasn’t it America’s Terror Couple, Barack Hussein and Michelle Obama, who did that? Shouldn’t satire at least reference things that have some sort of basis?

Oh, and don’t steal others’ ideas. Yeah, that too. Lazy.

Update: Armbiner notes another cartoon that is similar and also ran last week.

Update II: Off topic – Another graphic from South Carolina Senator Kevin Bryant. It ain’t satire. It ain’t funny. In fact, it’s actually quite childish, if you ask me.

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John McCain, Go Cheney Yourself

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True to form, when their backs are to the wall, even the mavericks in the GOP can not avoid the seduction of a little Dolchstoßlegende :

I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

Video here.

This is for you, Johnny McMaverick. I hope you understand my straight talk:

Does anyone still doubt he is any different from the current occupants of the executive branch? This was inevitable when he got folks like Goldfarb and Rove apparatchiks running your campaign.

*** Update ***

Even Jokeline is shocked, and that jackass will excuse anything.

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Another Open Thread

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I really enjoyed the new Batman. Very brooding, very dark- but good nonetheless. Heath Ledger was very solid, the music was great, and I am finally to the point where the sound effects in theatres are too loud for me.

Twenty-Seven minutes of previews, which ended abruptly as I was stating to the person I was with “Just start the god damned movie” loud enough for her to hear over the sound of the commercials, so obviously everyone in the damned theater heard it. Bastards.

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Danger Will Robinson

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I predict right now that this piece will create a major-league hissy fit:

A string of erroneous word choices is helping opponents make his 71 years a matter of age, not experience.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” when he apparently meant “Afghanistan” on Monday, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition.

Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken “Somalia” for “Sudan,” and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise – foreign affairs.

McCain will turn 72 the day after Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) accepts his party’s nomination for president, calling new attention to the sensitive issue of McCain’s advanced age, three days before the start of his own convention.

The McCain campaign says Obama has had plenty of flubs of his own, including a reference to “57 states” and a string of misstated place names during the primaries that Republicans gleefully sent around as YouTubes.

***

But McCain’s mistakes raise a serious, if uncomfortable question: Are the gaffes the result of his age? And what could that mean in the Oval Office?

Personally, I remain uncomfortable making age an issue, and really see no reason for Democrats to raise the issue. McCain is wrong on so many issues, why bother raising age with the potential backlash? And really, there is no need to- the issue, as we have seen, will raise itself. Every time Obama stands next to McCain on the stage, voters and the American public will see it as it is. McCain will look old next to Obama.

Again, that may not be fair, but it is what it is. And, I will state with full admiration, I don’t know where McCain gets his energy to campaign the way he has for the past two years. That in and of itself is quite impressive, although I don’t know where any of the candidates get their drive- Hillary Clinton was an iron woman during the primary, and never seemed fatigued. Were I in McCain’s shoes, there is no chance I could pull off what he has done so far. But then again, this just goes to show that the folks running for office are systematically different from the rest of us- I can think of a number of opportunities for me to tell reporters or political opponents to go Cheney themselves- acts that would have been election enders, were I in Obama’s or McCain’s shoes.

One good thing about this story- it certainly does appear that the glow is off the McCain campaign as far as the subservient media is concerned.

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Long Overdue

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This is a good change:

The Ford Motor Company, which devoted itself for nearly 20 years to putting millions of Americans into big pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles, is about to drastically alter its focus to building more small cars.

The struggling automaker, reacting to what it sees as a rapid and permanent shift in consumer tastes brought on by high gas prices, plans to unveil its new direction on Thursday, when it will report quarterly earnings.

Among the changes, Ford is expected to announce that it will convert three of its North American assembly plants from trucks to cars, according to people familiar with the plans.

And as part of the huge bet it is placing on the future direction of the troubled American auto industry, Ford will realign factories to manufacture more fuel-efficient engines and produce six of its next European car models for the United States market.

Couple questions-

1.) Isn’t this long overdue? Wouldn’t a responsible company that was actually concerned with the long-term health of the organization have made a shift like this a long, long time ago? If companies were concerned with long-term stability and profitability, rather than focusing on the rather short-term earnings reports, it would seem to me they would have, but as they are beholden to the shareholders who demand a dividend every quarter, they probably produced their cash cow trucks and SUV’s for far longer than they should have. Possibly a situation where capitalism works against itself.

2.) If Congress had acted responsibly over the past few decades and raised CAFE standards appropriately, rather than modest changes pushed off for decades in to the future, would this change have come earlier and left Ford in a much better position on the global market?

3.) Is it too late for Ford? Have they spent so much money marketing SUV’s and big trucks, creating an artificial “need” for giant vehicle penises so ingrained in the American public that the consumer is not going to be willing to make the shift to smaller vehicles as readily as they might have been otherwise? Or are gas prices enough to get people to shift quite quickly and happily?

Just some thoughts.

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