Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

In my day, never was longer.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

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

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

The lights are all blinking red.

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

Alternative history is always a weak argument. Always.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

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

Accountability, motherfuckers.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

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

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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Archives for September 2011

ZOMG! ScheduleGate!! President Obama is a Cave-Dwelling Cave Meister!

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This is Obama’s Katrina.

 For those of you who aren’t aware, Obama caved BIG-TIME yesterday… or something.

See, he wanted to address Congress about his jobs plan on September 7, which is Congress’s first day back from summer recess. (You remember jobs, right?  Most of you probably don’t have one because Congress refuses to do its job and come up with a plan to put Americans back to work.)

John Boehner, in an unprecedented yet unsurprising move, sent a letter to Administration saying, “No” — after initially offering no objection to the Obama administration’s chosen date:

[A]s the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving a President, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.

Despite the fact that the date was floated to the GOP and the GOP didn’t object, the White House pushed the address back a day because getting into a slapfight with Boehner would have only served to make everyone — not just the GOP, but also the Administration — look like asshats.

He pushed back the date by a whole day? The horror! The horror!

Delaying the address definitely proves that Obama caves on everything, and this is why he’s going to lose in 2012. Voters will remember the Day the Address Got Delayed By A Day, and voters will view it as Obama being a wimp (as Markos called him) or petty and incompetent (as Jon Walker of FDL called him) or so weak that he doesn’t even realize he’s being weak (as Cenk Ugyur called him).

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Every single Professional Left blog has front-page posts claiming that Obama is a wimp, a cavemeister, naive, petty, or incompetent:

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Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Fictioneer

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(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic has a pretty good thumbnail summary Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney: the Iraq war, torture, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, unlimited detention of the innocent, his radical view of executive power, etc. Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, sniffs about Cheney’s “cheap shots”:

“I think he’s just trying to, one, assert himself so he’s not in some subsequent time period tried for war crimes and, second, so that he somehow vindicates himself because he feels like he needs vindication. That in itself tells you something about him,” Wilkerson told ABC News, explaining that Cheney may have “angst” because of receiving deferments instead of serving in the Vietnam War like Wilkerson and others in the administration.
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“He’s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as ‘exploding heads all over Washington’ because that’s the way someone who’s decided he’s not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let’s get out in front of everybody, let’s act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him,” Wilkerson said alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.

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But IMO the most significant review so far is Dahlia Lithwick at Slate dissecting Cheney Getting Away With Torture:

This week Dick Cheney invites us all to join him again in a game he likes to play against the rest of us called Tedious Torture Standoff. He continues to assert—this time in his memoir, In My Time—that he has “no regrets” about developing the U.S. torture program, and he continues to argue—as he did this morning on the Today Show—that torturing prisoners is “safe, legal, and effective.” He continues to assert that he would “strongly support” water-boarding if actionable information could be elicited from a prisoner. He even says that different standards apply to torturing Americans and foreigners. Cheney is trying, in short, to draw us back into the same tiresome debate over the efficacy of torture, which is about as compelling as a debate about the efficacy of slavery or Jim Crow laws. Only fools debate whether patently illegal programs “work”—only fools or those who have been legally implicated in designing the programs in the first place…
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Speak to Me Your Song of Greed

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Here’s a classic corporate bullshit memo from T-Mobile’s president to his wage slaves (via), reacting to the news that the DOJ is going to try to block the T-Mobile/AT&T merger:

DT [T-Mobile] and AT&T believe the DOJ has failed to acknowledge the significant consumer benefits of this deal. DT remains convinced that bringing together these two world-class businesses would create significant benefits for customers and the country.

Translation: a sore asshole and an empty wallet are “consumer benefits”.

While this action is addressed in Federal court, the best thing you can do is continue to focus on strengthening our business and offering world class customer service.

So, stop what you were doing — polishing your resumes in preparation for the inevitable layoffs — and start trying to entice customers into making a two-year commitment to a company that won’t be around in a couple of months.

Customers have many reasons to choose T-Mobile—from the great value we offer, to compelling devices running on America’s largest 4G network and our leadership in customer service and satisfaction.

Those were the newest stats I could find — I doubt they’ve changed much.

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This Mess We’re In

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This asinine, silly, childish snit and clusterfuck over scheduling of Obama’s speech on jobs shows that John Boehner is a utter dick, or that the Obama administration is hopelessly naive and John Boehner is an utter dick. I guess I’m pretty sure about the dick part, the rest is kind of grey.

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Today in the Politics of Pets

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Mary Shannon Johnstone is a talented photographer who is working on a documentary series called Breeding Ignorance, which is a four-part piece about where unwanted pets come from, how they are euthanized, life in a shelter, and the practice of spaying and neutering. Fair warning: some of the images are quite disturbing, and others are pretty graphic depictions of surgical procedures on cats and dogs. One thing I learned from the series is that some shelters have a spaying program for feral cats, which is awesome.

ED Kain has the story of Steven Seagal, who accompanied Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s excursion into a Phoenix neighborhood with an armored vehicle, all to arrest a suspected cockfighter. During that arrest, a puppy was killed after the tank Segal was riding in crashed into the house. Seagal is being sued for $100,000 and is being asked for a written apology.

Update: In unrelated news, a regular commenter reminds me that EDK also has a good post on climate change at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen that’s well worth a read.

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Even More Agony, Rather Less Ecstasy

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From Jenna Marotta at New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog, the story of one more rightbrain individual who truly, seriously regrets the bad news about Steve Jobs:

Mike Daisey, creator and star of The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a solo show opening October 11 at the Public, was at Disneyland last week when he learned of the Apple CEO’s resignation. “I found out on my iPhone,” Daisey said yesterday, still stuck in California as a result of post-Hurricane Irene travel chaos. “I just had the feeling you get when you realize that something terrible has happened, when you feel your center of gravity drop down to your bowels. What I think was really telling was that the release date for his authorized was moved up from March to November, because I think he wants to see it happen.”
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Daisey is known for lengthy monologues like If You See Something Say Something, Monopoly!, Truth, and The Ugly American (most of them directed by his wife, Jean-Michele Gregory). Even though Daisey calls Jobs “a hero of mine,” the monologist had enough concerns about Apple and its co-founder to fuel a critical two-hour piece that explores the human cost of Apple’s global supply chain, and the ultimate price of the shiny gadgets carried by so many. “Being a total tyrant and taskmaster,” Daisey says, “[Jobs] created the first global corporation that is welded to a single human vision.”…
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Jobs’s resignation and failing health have certainly altered the atmosphere for the show. “When someone gets ill,” Daisey acknowledges, “it’s hard to talk about that onstage.” But Daisey won’t be rewriting the play to accommodate the new developments. If Jobs should actually pass away during the show’s run, Daisey says he’ll be respectful without “lionizing” him or “creating a religion” of Jobs. Ultimately, he said, “the monologue is about the end of an era” at Apple more than a biography of Jobs. “The people who founded Apple used to call themselves pirates; it went from being a company about freedom to a company that’s becoming more interested in control than creating a great user experience.”

I’m so old, I still have an aural memory of Vaughn Meader saying, “… and the rubbah swaaaaan is MINE!” on my parents’ hi-fi record player. And that’s what ran through my mind even before I read Marotte’s article… although, fortunately, Daisey’s career is not nearly as dependent on one particular monologue as Meader’s was on his impersonation of JFK.

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