Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Books are my comfort food!

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

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

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

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

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

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

The National Guard is not Batman.

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

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

I really should read my own blog.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

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

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Archives for 2009

Wanted: Opposition Party

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Yesterday, in his taped message to the nation, Obama gave the Republican party an opportunity for relevance:

Every program, every entitlement, every dollar. An opportunity to catalog all the spending Republicans and conservatives think is useless and bring it up for a hearing, and be part of the dialog and have a say in the budgeting priorities. He is giving you guys an opportunity to be relevant. Rahm Emanuel did it again on Sunday:

EMANUEL: And if you go through the process on kids’ health care, national service, as well as getting resources necessary for stabilizing the banks, every one of those votes has been bipartisan.

The challenge will be, will the Republicans come to the table with constructive ideas?

Then, today, President Obama went out and taunted you all and asked for only 100 million in cuts from each department. $100 million. You can sneeze and cut that from the smallest department out there.

So what are right-wing bloggers talking about today? Obama shaking Hugo Chavez’s hand and how waterboarding isn’t torture.

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A well-deserved Pulitzer

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I’m very happy to see this:

Times reporter David Barstow won the Investigative prize for his report on the relationship between the Pentagon and TV military analysts.

Yeah, Jon Mecham won one this year too and Tom Friedman has won a total of three in his career, so the award is a bit of a joke. But it’s good to see Barstow’s important — and widely ignored within the mainstream media — work get its due.

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Inside the Hive Mind

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I never so completely understood the title of Liberal Fascism until after I read this John Harwood NY Times piece:

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”

I suppose after fascism loses its luster, you could move on to botulism. Or cubism.

*** Update ***

A mind meld with teh Sadlies.

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WATB On Wall Street

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You really have to read this piece called the “Wail of the 1%” to believe it. My personal favorite quote is the following:

The argument that Obama has in fact done a great deal to help Wall Street—to the tune of trillions of dollars—doesn’t have much truck with these critics. “If you really take a look at what Obama is promising, it’s frightening,” says Nicholas Cacciola, a 44-year-old executive at a financial-services firm. “He’s punishing you for doing better. He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation—it’s wealth distribution. Why are you being punished for making a lot of money?” As a Republican corporate lawyer puts it: “It’s the politics of envy, and that’s very dangerous.”

After watching the 60 Minutes piece last night about how these guys got filthy rich on fees on your money, the notion that these guys are about wealth creation just tickled me. If ever there was a portrait of entitlement, it is these guys.

(via the comments)

*** Update ***

This Joe Klein piece is excellent.

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She moves in mysterious ways

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Sully catches Nooners waxing philosophic about torture:

“Some things in life need to be mysterious … Sometimes you need to just keep walking.”

The following is disturbing and I won’t want to include it in this post, but it’s been rattling around in my head apropos of torture after reading a bit of a Wells Tower short story about an unprovoked Viking assault on nearby island. I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to face the fact that we are the kind of society that now condones this sort of thing (to some extent, the story may be a metaphor for the Iraq war). Edit: I took out the graphic description from the story. You can read it at the link.

I find all of this terrible to think about, but to just “keep walking” is barbarism.

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Hand jive

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Halperin’s fronting the absurd Chavez handshake story. The Politico has convened their asinine Arena panel to discuss it. And Newt is leading the charge on this. James Wolcott said it best:

Only within the Beltway popcorn popper could Gingrich, whose serpent tongue and ogre ego did so much to polarize discourse in the 1990s and abort reform, be considered a foxy catch. Only in Washington, D.C., could Gingrich, a magpie of futurist jargon and a bumptious opportunist, pass himself off as an iconoclastic force and centrifuge of ideas, a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Che Guevara leading a commando raid on the buffet table.

It’s a good thing there was no real news over the past week.

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The wages of wiretapping Jane’s sedition?

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No one could have predicted that Jane Harman would get caught on tape promising favors to AIPAC:

Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

It’s a kooky story — it was one of those controversial (read: probably illegal) it was some kind of NSA wiretap (I don’t know how permission to tap was granted, if at all) and Gonzo supposedly used this to blackmail Harman into supporting his wiretap program.

JMM and other people who understand all this better than I do have more on this.

The whole thing makes me laugh: sleazy “liberal hawk” Congresswoman gets wiretapped and then blackmailed by an even sleazier Attorney General. It’s the perfect story for our times, in many ways.

And I think we can all agree: shame on Nancy Pelosi for not letting Harman chair the Intelligence Committee. I’m fairly certain there’s a great deal of anti-Semitism at the root of all this.

I just hope that neither Harman nor Gonzo is prosecuted for any of this. Obama has so much on his plate already.

Update. I’m trying to understand the nature of the wiretap. The article states that “Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application” so FISA wasn’t bypassed entirely. It’s also not clear to me why the call was wiretapped in the first place. I’m hoping someone who knows more about this will sort this out later. It’s possible that this is an example of the worst sort of wiretapping abuse, but it’s possible that it’s something else entirely. I can’t tell.

Updated update. Matt Yglesias makes the key point:

And of course it further confirms the point that wide-net surveillance authority is as likely to be used and abused for domestic political purposes as for counterterrorism.

Update update update: Marcy Wheeler says the wiretap was totally legit:

The CQ story makes it clear that this wiretap was court approved and was directed not at Harman, but at the suspected Israeli spy whom she was talking to.

[….]

In other words, the investigation–and the wiretaps–were the classic, proper use of FISA: for an intelligence investigation targeting suspected agents of a foreign power operating in the US. And it goes without saying that we all better hope the NSA listens closely to conversations between powerful members of Congress and suspected spies, and that when they make quid pro quo deals, that conversation gets looked at much more closely. This was a totally proper use of NSA wiretaps.

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