Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

The revolution will be supervised.

T R E 4 5 O N

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Consistently wrong since 2002

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

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

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

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Republicans in disarray!

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Everybody saw this coming.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

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This Will Be Bad

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Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority

This is not going to end well:

A former police officer who is white was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter Thursday in the killing of an unarmed black man in Oakland, California.

Johannes Mehserle, who was a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer at the time of the incident, was convicted in the shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant on a California train platform on January 1, 2009. Mehserle, who was on duty at the time, said at the trial that he intended to draw and fire his Taser rather than his gun, CNN affiliate KTVU reported.

Mehserle got four years, maximum. Did the jury watched the damned video:

Four years for casually pulling your gun and murdering someone. It’s good to be a gangsta.

*** Update ***

Pretty much:

Mehserle will do less time for shooting & killing Oscar Grant than Plaxico Burress is doing for shooting himself in the leg…

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Excuses, Excuses

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Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle waited until the last minute to veto a civil union bill, supposedly because she was contemplating it deeply. Judging from the stories on this, it looks like she was actually spending time cooking up lame excuses:

“It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude to be made by one individual or a small group of elected officials,” she said.

Representative democracy is just so damn controversial. Also, too: supermajority!

“I have been open and consistent in my opposition to same-sex marriage, and find that House Bill 444 is essentially same-sex marriage by another name.”

I thought the whole issue with the “sanctity of marriage” was that “marriage” is a sacred sacrament, we can’t force churches to marry gays, blah blah blah. I guess we’re down to the nub of it now: hating homos isn’t just for Sunday, it’s for everyday.

Finally, a big shout out to the Hawaii House of Representatives, which has a 45-6 Democratic majority, yet has chosen not to vote on a veto override.

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You Say Abortion, I Say Contraception

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The FDA is considering approval of “Ella”, a new morning after pill that works up to five days after sex, causing Right-To-Lifers to get all pissy pants (via). That’s funny, because this WHO study (via this menstruation blog) shows that the existing Plan B emergency contraception pill will stop most pregnancies in the five day window. Ella might be better, but what we have now is pretty good.

Plan B is the biggest unheralded loss that the Right-to-Lifers have suffered in the last few years. From their perspective, it’s an over-the-counter abortion in pill form. And look who’s using it:

It turns out in the study — published in the Journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — that most of the women who took the drug between two days and five days after unprotected sex were young, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25. And 60 percent were white. More than two-thirds had some college or were college graduates.

If Right-to-Lifers can’t force smart white girls to have unwanted babies, what’s a movement for? (Apparently to punish poor and minority women, but that’s not news to anyone who’s been paying attention.)

Ella is chemically related to RU-486, which is another big Right-to-Life loss. In 2006, the last year with statistics, it was responsible for 11% of abortions. I’d be surprised if that number hasn’t doubled by now.

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Solo Americanos, Por Favor

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Just a guess, but could this hick Sherlock be up for re-election?

A sheriff in suburban New Orleans has asked federal authorities to investigate reports that illegal immigrants are working on the Gulf oil spill cleanup effort. […]

Stephens says he wants to protect the community from “criminal elements” and not “people who want to earn an honest buck.”

Right, because the “criminal elements” always gravitate towards dirty, difficult, manual labor.

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Kind of Surprising

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This took me by surprise:

A big step forward for the push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: Senator Ben Nelson, who has been aggressively lobbied for months by gay rights groups, is announcing that he’ll support the repeal compromise.

I figured we would lose Webb and Lincoln and Nelson and pick up Snowe, Collins, and maybe a couple other Republicans.

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But He Didn’t Do It in the Loudest and Most Disruptive Manner Possible, So It Doesn’t Really Count!

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Meanwhile:

Congress appears poised to repeal the ban on gays in the military, with the quiet support of the White House and without opposition from the Pentagon, according to statements out from gay rights groups this evening.

The repeal is a careful dance: The Pentagon has remained publicly neutral in the process, while the Administration weighed in in a low-key, wonky, two-paragraph letter to Congress that makes no reference to the moral case for repeal. It is signed not by President Obama but by Budget Director Peter Orszag.

The effect of the public relations moves is to put the credit or blame for repeal on Congress and a group led by Senators Carl Levin and Joe Lieberman and Rep. Patrick Murphy. But the practical effect is the same: A military that, some time next year, will likely begin to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly.

And I bet there will be a very limited public freak-out by the GOP.

If he’d really cared, he would have signed an executive order on day one and said “F- You bigots,” then it would have counted and Democrats would be motivated to go to the polls. But this doing things through the legislature so it is permanent and official and successful- that’s not the hope and change we signed up for. Where’s the passion! Where’s his inner Truman FDR George Bush…

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You Have To Break Some Eggs

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Assholes:

Preliminary information indicates that members of the Detroit Police Special Response Team approached the house and announced themselves as police, Godbee said, citing the officers and at least one independent witness.

“As is common in these types of situations, the officers deployed a distractionary device commonly known as a flash bang,” he said in the statement. “The purpose of the device is to temporarily disorient occupants of the house to make it easier for officers to safely gain control of anyone inside and secure the premise.”

Upon entering the home, the officer encountered a 46-year-old female inside the front room, Godbee said. “Exactly what happened next is a matter still under investigation, but it appears the officer and the woman had some level of physical contact.

“At about this time, the officer’s weapon discharged one round which, tragically, struck 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones in the neck/head area.”

Yes, this was a murder investigation, but why is it COMMON for police to be throwing god damned grenades into people’s houses? You think that might be the problem? Did they have somewhere else to be? Couldn’t they wait until the morning? Are stake-outs just in the movies these days?

I’m surprised they didn’t charge the family with child endangerment like they did in Missouri.

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