Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

We still have time to mess this up!

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

You cannot love your country only when you win.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

We will not go back.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The National Guard is not Batman.

I really should read my own blog.

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Archives for 2009

Tell me that it isn’t true

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At the end of a pretty good piece about Republicans’ lack of a coherent position on global warming is this nugget:

And Republican opinion leaders Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deride global warming as a “scam” and a “hoax.” The Washington Post’s George Will frequently expresses skepticism about the severity of man-made global warming.

“If they come to the table, a lot of them see political suicide because of the effect of the principled punditry,” said one House Democratic aide. “A lot of the people that can unleash on them don’t think it’s a problem.”

Realistically, are we looking at a future where Republicans have to kowtow to Glenn Beck? Will there be apologies every time one of them makes fun of the Fear Chamber or the Doom Room?

I’ve gotten used to the idea that they have to do what Rush Limbaugh says and it doesn’t bother me that much, because I don’t think Rush is any crazier than most of them are. But Glenn Beck…I know he has good ratings, but have things really gone that far?

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Harman’s Mess and DiFi’s Largesse

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Reading this transcript of her NPR appearance, it sure seems like Harman is in a heap of trouble. As someone emailed me, she contradicts herself and then becomes very evasive. I do find it amusing that she is this bent about a legal and lawful use of wiretapping when she supported warrantless wiretapping on all of us.

In other news, DiFi appears to have her own issues:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., offered to help the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. secure federal funds last year, just days before the agency awarded a contract to Feinstein’s husband’s firm in the housing foreclosure crisis.

Under FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, the contract went to CB Richard Ellis Group, the biggest commercial real estate services company in the world. The Washington Times first reported details of the deal Tuesday.

Well played.

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How Does He Get Away With It?

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Greg Sargent appears to have caught Cheney in the middle of a lie over whether or not he has actually requested that new memos be declassified (Update- nope- Cheney was not lying– just wrong about who he asked- he put the request through the National Archives, not the CIA), but it seems like there is an even more basic lie than that. Here is what Cheney told Hannity:

One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.

And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.

Is this really the case? Did the Obama administration just pick and choose which memos to release?

Unless I am missing something, no. The three Bradbury memos were all released because of an ACLU legal action, and the Bybee memo was tossed on at the end in an agreement:

The Justice Department has sought an extension of the government’s deadline to decide whether to disclose three legal memoranda authored in May 2005 by Steven Bradbury, then a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). The memos authorized the CIA to subject prisoners to torture methods including waterboarding. In ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal judge had given the Justice Department until today to disclose the memos or explain its refusal to do so. The ACLU has consented to extend the production deadline to April 16 in return for the government’s representation that high-level officials will consider the release not only of the Bradbury memos but also a memo authored in August 2002 by Jay S. Bybee, who was then the head of the OLC. The Bush administration had previously withheld the Bybee memo.

In other words, it appears Cheney is lying. Again. The Obama administration wasn’t just putting out memos to make Tricky Dick Two look bad, they were reacting to a specific request for those memos.

If I’m wrong about this, fill me in. Otherwise, explain to me how Cheney keeps getting away with this sort of stuff? And couldn’t he have declassified all this stuff just a few months ago?

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The importance of humble beginnings

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I couldn’t help but notice this in the article about the “Wail of the 1%” that John linked to yesterday:

Jake DeSantis, a 40-year-old commodities trader at AIG, was an unlikely face of Wall Street greed. Stocky and clean cut, with an abiding moral streak, he’d worked summers for a bricklayer in the shadow of shuttered steel mills outside Pittsburgh; he was valedictorian of his high-school class and attended college at MIT.

You see, it doesn’t matter if he’s spoiled and greedy now, because he laid bricks over the summer when he was a teen-ager? Don’t you elitists get this?

It’s striking how much we now see the idea that a working-class childhood justifies an adulthood of careerist whoring. Somerby’s been all over this for years, but I think the most blatant example I’ve ever seen is this bit from a chat with Howard Kurtz recently:

Reader: Much of the scalding tone many of your writers on these chats are subjected to from readers is based on this premise. We know that the Post, the Times, the networks are working to support the establishment at all cost. (In Broder’s famous and haughty dismissal of Bill Clinton “this is not his town”). But the problem is that you guys don’t like to portray yourselves as defenders of the establishment. You are the “little guy.” No you are not. Be honest with your audience.

Howard Kurtz: Talk about sweeping generalizations! Evan Thomas declares himself part of the establishment and suddenly every member of the major newspapers and networks are pillars of that establishment as well?
That would be news to Brian Williams, who was a volunteer fireman as a young man and washed out in his first job at a tiny Kansas station. And news to me, a guy who went to a state university. And news to Katie Couric, who started out on the University of Virginia’s student paper and washed out in her first national job, at CNN. And news to longtime Post editor Len Downie, who went to Ohio State University and started here as an intern. And also news to me, a kid from Brooklyn who never met a professional journalist until my junior year at a state university.
If you want to say these are big corporations, if you want to criticize what they do, be my guest. But let’s not assume that everyone in the business grew up in the bosom of the establishment.

An even more amazing example is George Bush’s claim (from a 2000 Nick Lemann piece that’s subscription only) that the biggest difference between him and Al Gore is that Bush went to San Jacinto Junior High.

How did this idea of humble, or humbler, beginnings become so important? It’s worth noting that it’s Randian as well — her heroes usually come from the working class, even if they spend their adult lives spitting on it.

Update. I know that the Horatio Alger stuff has always been really big in stories about business people, but when did it cross over into being so important for journalists and politicians? I mean, I get the idea of “hungry kid” makes good, but when did it become a marker of solid journalistic common sense. That’s what I really don’t get.

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Cruel To Be Kind

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Another Bush administration member takes to the WaPo to point out that by torturing, we are helping terrorists do their duty to Allah:

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, “as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, ‘brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that “Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.” The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

It just never stops with these guys, does it?

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