Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“They all knew.”

Let me file that under fuck it.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

This blog will pay for itself.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

People are weird.

Republicans in disarray!

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Archives for 2009

The Skills to Pay the Bills

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Trouble in paradise:

A battle over control of the party’s purse strings has erupted at the troubled Republican National Committee, with defenders of Chairman Michael S. Steele accusing dissident RNC members of trying to “embarrass and neuter” the party’s new leader.

Randy Pullen, the RNC’s elected treasurer, former RNC General Counsel David Norcross and three other former top RNC officers have presented Mr. Steele with a resolution, calling for a new set of checks and balances on the chairman’s power to dole out money.

The powers include new controls on awarding contracts and spending money on outside legal and other services.

Talk about a vote of confidence! At this point, we have to begin to wonder if Michael Steele will make it to the midterm elections. I’m doubting he will.

Also, thank goodness the adults are in charge! That can’t be said enough.

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Open Thread

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Figured there were a bunch of new threads up, so we probably needed one designated for random babble. At any rate, one of the things I have been doing the past couple of weeks is getting into a solid routine of taking long walks in the morning, and since the weather has been so nice, I’m to the point now that I walk for an hour or more every morning. It is nice, I am dropping a little weight, and I just feel so much better every day when I start it that way.

The only problem is that I get tired of listening to music in the morning, so I have become a voracious consumer of podcasts. If a newspaper or magazine has a podcast, there are very good odds that I have sampled it in the last couple months. Some are better than others, but I wanted to take a moment and single out one that I think is just spectacular- The New Yorker’s Political Scene. They are too short, and happen only once a week, but they are, in my mind, exactly what a podcast should be. They keep a brisk pace, have great sound production qualities, are informative, and leave you feeling like you have learned something and wishing the podcast was longer. Last week they had Jane Mayer, a couple weeks ago Ryan Lizza was a guest discussing Obanamics, etc. At any rate, since we spend so much time trashing the media and pundits, I thought I would give a shout out to content that I think is really good. I just wish they released more of them.

It has been forever since we had some pet pics up, so here goes:

You are on your own until later on. Behave.

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Not Long For the Party

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I’m not sure how long Olympia Snow will remain a Republican- she just seems too damned sane:

It was as though beginning with Senator Jeffords’s decision, Republicans turned a blind eye to the iceberg under the surface, failing to undertake the re-evaluation of our inclusiveness as a party that could have forestalled many of the losses we have suffered.

It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of “Survivor” — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party.

Senator Specter indicated that his decision was based on the political situation in Pennsylvania, where he faced a tough primary battle. In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide.

I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates.

In that same vein, I am reminded of a briefing by a prominent Republican pollster after the 2004 election. He was asked what voter groups Republicans might be able to win over. He responded: women in general, married women with children, Hispanics, the middle class in general, and independents.

How well have we done as a party with these groups? Unfortunately, the answer is obvious from the results of the last two elections. We should be reaching out to these segments of our population — not de facto ceding them to the opposing party.

She seems to honestly have a grip on what is going on around her, and no doubt will need to be branded a heretic and drummed out of God’s Own Party. All that editorial space, and she didn’t take the time to praise tax cuts and talk about pork or call Michael Moore fat? Get rid of that RINO. She isn’t pure enough.

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One Hundred Days of Platitudes

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So, we are at the vaunted 100 day mark, and that means that pundits everywhere have decided it is time to “grade” the Obama administration. Putting aside the fact that the first hundred days is just a made up metric that makes no sense whatsoever, what we can expect today is gushing reports about the President’s poll numbers, streams of partisan Democratic operatives flooding the airwaves telling us how wonderful things are fairly balanced with hundreds of Republican operatives telling us how much everything sucks.

Break out the hipwaders.

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Things I Wish I Had Written

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This:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of “good riddance/get lost/don’t let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out” and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

I’m still laughing.

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Regrets, I Have a Few

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But Judge Bybee does not:

Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The Washington Post on Saturday to that effect. Given the widespread criticism of the memorandums, he said he would have done some things differently, like clarifying and sharpening the analysis of some of his answers to help the public better understand the basis for his conclusions.

But he said: “The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.”

Other administration lawyers agreed with those conclusions, Judge Bybee said.

“The legal question was and is difficult,” he said. “And the stakes for the country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”

Kind of makes that WaPo piece with all of Bybee’s friends announcing his regrets look funny. Not sure how you square that piece with the statement today from Bybee. You know what they say, though- in for a penny, in for pounding a child’s testicles.

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