Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

He really is that stupid.

T R E 4 5 O N

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

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

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

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Archives for 2008

Patriotism

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Means dodging your taxes:

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

***

With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.

The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.

Criminal. Absolutely fucking criminal.

*** Update ***

Quote of the year, from the comments:

This is fucking ridiculous. You literally cannot go one fucking day without hearing about someone tied to the Bush administration doing something patently fucking evil, borderline illegal, or screwing the public. You’d think they’d need to at least go on vacation at some point after the last 7 years of this. It’s got to be hard work finding something reprehensible to be part of every single day.

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WTF IS Wrong With This Woman?

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Hillary:

n a Cabinet-style setting, surrounded by retired military leaders, Sen. Hillary Clinton said the public should ask whether Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has met the criteria needed to become the nation’s commander in chief.

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Is she running for the GOP nomination, or is she just trying to make sure that if Obama wins the nomination, he loses in 2008?

Christ on a crutch, I am tired of the Clintons. And just as an FYI, being held as a POW and wrecking your plane on a ship and then being wrong about EVERYGODDAMNEDTHING in Iraq does not make you “Commander in Chief” material. Neither does being in bed next to your husband when he answers the phone at 3am. Please just stfu, Hillary.

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RED ALERT- WINGNUT NARRATIVE IN DANGER

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Someone better go stock up the Confederate Yankee’s refrigerator with a few extra cases of Jolt and Mountain Dew, because the honor and integrity of all of our fighting men is once again on the line:

he Marine Corps released a statement today that it is investigating a video that began circulating online yesterday of a uniformed Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff.

Puppy The video is here, but beware, it’s unsettling. Note: Citing a terms-of-use violation, YouTube removed its most-watched version of the video, even after it had been posted for a day and had received worldwide attention and become a legitimate news story.

In the video, a second Marine identifies the first by name;

“That was mean, Motari,” he says, unconvincingly.

Online denizens quickly located the Bebo.com profile of a Marine named David Motari. The Marine Corps press office confirmed that Motari is, or at one time was, in the corps.

I thought after the Beauchamp incident, we all knew for sure that American soldiers never would do anything like this, as all our soldiers are, to a man, perfect angels. This obviously fake video is clearly an attempt to sap our will to fight, so I hope the wingnuttosphere debunks this soon before I have to wear a burkha to work.

In all seriousness, yes, the video is disgusting, and no, it does not surprise me one bit. People do cruel and stupid things in the military, and only the idiots in the right-wing blogosphere want to pretend otherwise. Is this video real? Looks like it, but who knows (and that isn’t because I want it to be real to advance my left-wing narrative). Is it realistic and believable? Sure. And if this jackass did in fact throw the dog off the cliff, it doesn’t mean a damned thing about our troops in general. It just means that David Motari is an asshole and is about to be in a bunch of trouble.

*** Update ***

We will defer all judgements regarding the accuracy of this video to Snopes.

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Do-Overs

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So, Hillary wants a do-over in Florida and Michigan – both broke the rules, as you all well know. That made me think of some do-overs I would like:

  • When I bought my 2003 Saab, my dad told me I should never buy the first production year of a new model. “Wait for the bugs to be worked out,” he said. I bought it anyway. Right now, my car is in the garage awaiting a new engine. $3800. Sure, I should have listened. But can I get a do-over?
  • I went on a cruise in 1997. I played Blackjack for two hours and was up by about $400. I decided to start betting $50 a hand. My friend, Kevin, told me how stupid I was. I lost it all. I wish I had a do-over.
  • That credit card I ran up during my undergrad years – the one my mom always hounded me about that took me 4 years to pay off? Visa? Can I have a do-over?
  • January 14th, 2007. I definitely would like a do-over for that!
  • November, 2000 and November, 2004. Can the whole nation get a do-over please?
  • Pretty much everything I wrote on my own blog prior to 2004 – I’d really like a do-over on that!
  • Oh, and that time back when I was a zygote and made the conscious decision that I wanted to be gay. What a nightmare that turned out to be in high school. Can I take it back please?

If wishes were horses…

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Reason Number Eleventy-Three Not To Torture

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Because the evidence is inadmissible (unless you run a kangaroo court in Gitmo- then it is kosher!) in civilized societies:

The Canadian government is no longer using evidence gained from CIA interrogations of a top Al Qaeda detainee who was waterboarded.

According to documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s national-security agency, last month quietly withdrew statements by alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah from public papers outlining the case against two alleged terror “sleeper” operatives in Ottawa and Montreal.

The move, which so far has received no public attention, is the latest sign of potential international fallout from the CIA’s recent confirmation that it waterboarded a handful of high-profile Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. The use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were approved by the Bush White House and Justice Department. Waterboarding, which critics charge is a form of torture, involves strapping a suspect to an inclined board and forcing water into his lungs, typically by pouring water through a cloth placed over his nose and mouth.

I really don’t know how long it will take to repair the damage these bedwetting jackasses in the Bush White House have done to our international standing, our intelligence agencies, our military, and our political culture. On the upside of things, though, the Bush Presidency will end earlier than most, as they will have to suspend operations from November on to focus on writing pardons.

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EnroNRCC

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This sure will be helpful this fall during their re-election bids:

According to The New York Times this morning, It all began to unravel when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), a CPA, asked to meet with the audit firm that was supposedly checking the NRCC’s books, an idea that apparently no one had had for several years. Christopher Ward, then the NRCC’s treasurer, finally relented, but then chickened out 30 minutes before and fessed up that there actually hadn’t been any audits.

It was ultimately discovered that Ward had been faking the audits since 2003. The Politico, which laid out this general outline of events early last month, reported that Ward had forged everything, including the letterhead. So when it came time to actually talk to the people who’d supposedly written those fake reports, it all unraveled.

The FBI is currently investigating, and it’s not clear yet why Ward was so keen to hide the real numbers. But as the Times reports this morning, the signs are not good. NRCC internal audits since Ward’s discovery show that “hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen.” And it gets worse: there are apparently indications that “the financial irregularities might extend beyond the national committee to the campaign funds of individual Republican lawmakers who also worked with Mr. Ward, a longtime party operative.”

I bet the donors love this shit. “Our ideas are bad and we will lose your money trying to enact them! -NRCC”

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Kill Me Now

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Some jackass threw an incendiary device through the window of a recruiting station in Times Square, so you all know what that means- another 5 weeks of LIEBERALS HATE AMERIKKA from the chest-thumping, cheeto-munching chickenhawk brigade. Take it away, Captain Ed, new skipper of Malkin’s Hot Air:

Given the escalating protests over military recruitment, it seems inevitable that people would bomb those who seek to protect the nation and fight our enemies.

Read that sentence five times and try to make sense of it. For good clean fun, use that logical formula to create your own wingnutty assertions. Here is mine:

Given the escalating stupidity in right wing blogs, it seems inevitable that people would bomb those who seek to manufacture Mountain Dew and Cheetos.

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