Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

So many bastards, so little time.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

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

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

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

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Let there be snark.

T R E 4 5 O N

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Come on, man.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2009

Archives for 2009

All I really need to know about national security I learned on the teevee

by | 26 Comments

This post is in: 

This is what it’s come to, from the Wall Street Journal (via via):

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception.

The unfine print of the new Screen Actors’ Guild contract contains what might be called a “Tootsie” exception which allows male actors to be fired if they impersonate a woman on a soap opera for several weeks. The unfine print of most insurance waivers contains what be called a “Hancock” exception which prevents the signee from suing if he is injured by a a vigilante superhero.

People, it’s a fucking television show.

All I really need to know about national security I learned on the teeveePost + Comments (26)

Reading Is Fundamental (Unless You Are a Right Wing Blogger)

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: ,

Captain Ed is a hoot this morning:

Can this inauguration get any more embarrassing? First, our Chief Justice flubs the oath of office — the entire reason for the event — and then the President delivers a downer speech that even his adoring throngs can’t cheer. Now it turns out that the musicians pulled a Milli Vanilli and synchronized themselves to recorded music…

From the article he links:

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Undeterred, our brave skipper sails on with some updates:

Update III: Just to clarify, there are good reasons not to play stringed instruments in 30-degree weather. Having a recording as a contingency makes some sense, if one insists on scheduling a string ensemble for an outdoor performance in January in DC, when that kind of weather is the norm rather than the exception. If you play the recording instead of performing live, though, be honest about it.

From the article he links:

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

In other words, it is embarrassing because it is just like Milli Vanilli except it isn’t at all like Malli Vanilli if you rely on Ed’s source, and it is embarrassing because they weren’t open and honest about it except for the fact that Ed’s source says they were open and honest about it.

You know, how much of the problem with the wingnuttosphere’s stupidity is THAT THEY SIMPLY CAN NOT READ?

Reading Is Fundamental (Unless You Are a Right Wing Blogger)Post + Comments (33)

Christopher Reeve’s Dream

by | 64 Comments

This post is in: 

Is starting to happen:

In a watershed moment for one of the most contentious areas of science and American politics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the first-ever human trial of a medical treatment derived from embryonic stem cells.

Geron Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif., biotechnology company, is expected to announce Friday that it received a green light from the agency to mount a study of its stem-cell treatment for spinal cord injuries in up to 10 patients. The announcement caps more than a decade of advances in the company’s labs and comes on the cusp of a widely expected shift in U.S. policy toward support of embryonic stem-cell research after years of official opposition.

“This is the dawn of a new era in medical therapeutics,” said Thomas B. Okarma, Geron’s president and chief executive officer. The hope that stem-cell therapy will repair and regenerate diseased organs and tissue “goes beyond what pills and scalpels can ever do.”

The potential and promise to this remains great, and hopefully this will be the beginning of the payoff for years of research.

And just as a side note, but this is something that really gets overlooked a lot. When that plane went down in the Hudson last week, and not one person was killed, even your host used terms like “miraculous” to describe the events. This caused more than one person to make comments like this:

Many, many commendations to the pilot for making the right decisions quickly, keeping his head and allowing his training to take over. He literally saved 150 lives.

The same to the crew and passengers for getting themselves out of a hellish situation quickly and orderly.

However, what I can’t stand is the talking heads that call it a “miracle” that the plane stayed together and was able to float long enough to get everyone off. No, it wasn’t an f’ing miracle! It was at least 100,000 man-hours of research, design and testing that built a machine that supposed to do that, with another who-knows-how-many hours of science research backing up that design.

I heard some anchor (maybe on MSNBC) talk about that being a miracle and almost lost it. Another example of the lack of respect for science and engineering among many parts of the population.

Call it a miracle (if that’s you’re persuasion) that it happened in one of the busiest waterways in the world, so that help showed up quickly. But don’t call it a miracle that a piece of technology that many people spent their entire careers creating worked like it was supposed to.

While I still think the plane landing was miraculous when you consider the combination of events that had to take place to have it occur without injury (What if the engines had gone out earlier in the plane’s ascent? What if there had been a different and less skilled pilot or crew? What if it had been a different airframe? What if there had been ferries in the way? What if the water had been rocky? And on and on.), the point is duly noted.

Should stem cell research lead us to a day in which the paralyzed can once again walk or that there is a cure for Alzheimers or cancer or Parkinson’s, it will be miraculous. However, that miracle will be the direct result of millions of hours spent by people in labs, squinting through microscopes in cold metallic labs with bad fluorescent lighting and only the dull hum of machinery to keep them company.

Christopher Reeve’s DreamPost + Comments (64)

All Of Bush’s Mistakes Are Obama’s Fault

by | 58 Comments

This post is in: ,

The NY Times:

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

Every time I see these stories, it makes my blood boil. This nonsense started last week with the Pentagon’s “timely” release of a report about 61 detainees, and continues on today on all your favorite fringe right blogs. The borg knows how to move in unison.

Here is what I don’t understand. Why is this repeatedly framed as a problem for Obama, when what this really is is evidence that the Bush administration accomplished NOTHING with Guantanamo. This is not a problem for Obama. This is proof that the last administration was a group of incompetent hacks. Bush decided that he had the right to detain people forever, do whatever he wanted to them, and they had no rights whatsoever, he ruined our international reputation and most likely violated dozens of laws, yet he let these allegedly dangerous people go. Why? What was the purpose of Gitmo, anyway? Why do all this stuff and STILL let the dangerous guys go free?

Because they had no idea what they were doing. They were so intent on DWTFTW, to hell with domestic and international law, that they paid no attention to the fact that torture and abuse doesn’t lead to good evidence and means that you can not prosecute. They made such a hash of the evidence that even today they can not prosecute half these guys because the evidence is in such disarray:

Vandeveld was assigned to the military prosecutor’s office at Guantanamo Bay in May 2007, shortly before Jawad was charged. Vandeveld, who as a civilian serves as a senior deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, said he was shocked by the “state of disarray” as he began to gather material for Jawad’s case file.

He said the evidence was scattered throughout databases, in desk drawers, in vaguely labeled containers or “simply piled on the tops of desks” of departed prosecutors.

“I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared” or had been stored in unknown locations, he said.

The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things.

And only in America would they never have to pay a price for that.

More here from Spencer Ackerman.

All Of Bush’s Mistakes Are Obama’s FaultPost + Comments (58)

Did Paterson nix Caroline on Sunday?

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: ,

My homies over at The Albany Project have done a great job covering the Caroline Kennedy mess today. Here’s a very interesting tidbit:

Apparently, the Governor had chosen his pick to replace Hillary Clinton on Sunday and decided to hold onto that information until after the inauguration in hopes of not taking any attention away from that event.

I have no idea if that might have affected her decision to drop out. Apparently, there was also a potential Nannygate scandal. Paterson will make his choice tomorrow at noon.

Another interesting tidbit I discovered from listening to Andrea Mitchell of all people: the reason Andrew Cuomo isn’t in the mix is that if he goes, then Paterson’s arch-enemy Shelly Silver gets to pick the new Attorney General (actually, this is obvious but I hadn’t thought of it).

Update: Ben Smith, who knows his NYS politics as well as anyone says:

The leaks that she had, allegedly, tax and nanny problems, reportedly came from Paterson’s camp.

And because people are all talking about this (if my inbox is any indication), the rumor is that it will be upstate NYS Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand.

Update update: It’s probably Gillibrand.

Update update update: It’s Gillibrand. Got this from a good reporter.

Did Paterson nix Caroline on Sunday?Post + Comments (68)

Probably not a coincidence

by | 56 Comments

This post is in: 

The Times has a piece about the fine whines the loyal Bushies are now enjoying as they leave Washington:

Mark McKinnon, the political consultant who helped elect Mr. Bush twice and was on the plane Tuesday, described the mood as one more of equanimity than resentment. In an essay on The Daily Beast, the new web magazine started by Tina Brown, Mr. McKinnon said there were good wishes for the new president and “an absence of malice one normally sees among the constituencies of the vanquished.” But he also said there were “some critical reviews of the speech, complaints about taking unnecessary shots and grousing about borrowed ideas.”

Mr. Obama never directly mentioned Mr. Bush’s name after the ritual thank you at the beginning of his Inaugural Address but the context of some of his remarks was lost on no one. He criticized “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” He assured the rest of the world “that we are ready to lead once more.”

Some writers, including David E. Sanger of The New York Times , concluded that it was the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933, that an incoming president used his Inaugural Address to so evidently repudiate his predecessor as he headed for the door.

If the shoe fits…

I got a kick out of this too:

The passengers were shown a 22-minute film produced by Scott Sforza and edited by Laura Crawford celebrating the Bush presidency.

Twenty-two minutes? Even his supporters could only squeeze 22 minutes of celebratory material out of an 8 year presidency.

Probably not a coincidencePost + Comments (56)