There really is nothing worse than not being able to fall asleep. Well, not being able to fall asleep while Tunch purrs in your left ear, Lily snores (and drools) on your right shoulder, and Rosie snores into your right thigh under the comforter. And you just lie there thinking, I hate all of you, but I love you so much so I am not going to move, but seriously, fuck you all.
Friday Evening Open Thread: And This Would Be A Bad Thing, Why…?
(Matt Davies via GoComics.com — click link for full-sized image)
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Normally I ignore Charles Krauthammer like I do my dog’s noisily self-grooming his groin area, but this is just too mock-worthy:
Let’s understand President Obama’s strategy in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. It has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform. This is entirely about politics. It’s Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.
This is why he sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to the Republicans to convey not a negotiating offer but a demand for unconditional surrender. House Speaker John Boehner had made a peace offering of $800 billion in new revenue. Geithner pocketed Boehner’s $800 billion, doubled it to $1.6 trillion, offered risible cuts that in 2013 would actually be exceeded by new stimulus spending and then demanded that Congress turn over to the president all power over the debt ceiling.
Boehner was stunned. Mitch McConnell laughed out loud. In nobler days, they’d have offered Geithner a pistol and an early-morning appointment at Weehawken. Alas, Boehner gave again, coming back a week later with spending-cut suggestions — as demanded by Geithner — only to have them dismissed with a wave of the hand.
What’s going on here? Having taken Boehner’s sword, and then his shirt, Obama sent Geithner to demand Boehner’s trousers. Perhaps this is what Obama means by a balanced approach….
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their pundits!
Friday Evening Open Thread: And This Would Be A Bad Thing, Why…?Post + Comments (84)
Department of Unfortunate Juxtaposition
I was listening to the noontime broadcast of NPR news, which always includes a segment for state news, and heard that Joe Manchin wrote a letter to MTV asking them to cancel BuckWild, which is essentially the Jersey Shore goes downstate WV. The VERY NEXT PIECE, which the announcer presented without so much as missing a beat, was the following news story:
Some people are appalled, others are supportive – either way, Mountaineer Mascot Jonathan Kimble won’t be taking his official rifle hunting anymore.
Recently, videos of Kimble surfaced on the internet, sparking mixed reactions. The video shows Kimble and a freshly killed black bear, which was shot with the same rifle Kimble takes to official appearances as the Mountaineer Mascot – such as football and basketball games.
Kimble broke no laws in hunting with the rifle – officially, there are no University codes preventing him. However, he has chosen to keep his Mountaineer rifle for appearances only.
“I know other Mountaineers have gone hunting with it – to kill deer and stuff, but it’s probably just better to keep it to appearances,” he said.
Love this state.
Eric Cantor holds up VAWA to protect rapists from Tribal prosecution
As some may know, there are a number of other things that will expire at the end of the year besides items related to the very, very, very gradual incline of fiscal doom that is obsessing so many beltway potentates.
One of these is the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This landmark legislation will expire at the end of the year unless the House acts. The Senate strengthen the law to extend protections to undocumented immigrants, members of the LGBT community and Native Americans. Eric Cantor and the GOP might let the first two groups slide by, but he has a problem with the injuns.
Eric Cantor holds up VAWA to protect rapists from Tribal prosecutionPost + Comments (113)
Goodwinned at the Cineplex
Have you seen “Lincoln” yet? Well, why not?
I saw it with my teenage daughter this week, and we both thought it was excellent. Daniel Day Lewis was fantastic as the tortured, humorous and scheming Mr. Lincoln. Sally Field was twitchy, brittle, sad and marvelous as Mary Todd Lincoln.
If the set accurately portrayed the White House circa 1865, it was a drafty, chilly, besieged place with few creature comforts (though surely a damn sight more luxurious than the average citizen had at the time, even in non-war-torn sections of the country).
The most affecting image from the film for me was Mr. Lincoln padding through the White House in his slippers, bundled up in a throw. This image recurred a couple of times if I recall correctly: It seemed to be filmed from the vantage point of Lincoln’s son Tad watching his father walk away in the gloom after fondly tucking the boy in for the night. It’s actually a pretty good visual metaphor for what our greatest president meant to us as a nation.
The only presidents my 14-year-old personally remembers are George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it was kind of a shock for her to see Republicans in the role of the good guys.
Please feel free to discuss the movie or whatever…
[X-posted at Rumproast]Early Morning Open Thread: I Love A Woman Who Knows What’s What
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com — click link for full-sized image)
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Now that Senator Elizabeth Warren (I still loving saying that) looks to be joining the Senate Banking Committee, here’s a look back to an interview she did with Charlie Pierce for Esquire before the election:
CHARLES P. PIERCE: How did we get back again to too big to fail? How did that happen?
ELIZABETH WARREN: I think it happened a couple of different ways. One of them was — and I think there was a miscalculation back in 2008, 2009 — a lot of people, at least I subscribed to it, a lot of people thought, Okay, we have 30 years of trying deregulation and to cut taxes and it has brought us to the biggest financial crisis since the great depression. So I thought what would happen over the next 50 years, we’d spend one year rewriting the financial rules and we’d be tough on the banks — as a country, we would be. And then the next 50 years, we’d concentrate on rebuilding America’s working families, creating opportunity and a better middle class, creating these opportunities for kids to rise out of poverty for all of our children to be included, because that’s what we do. I just truly believe that. I looked at that in 2008, 2009 and said, We tried the experiment…. Well, it just seemed so obvious to me! We had tried it, right? Coming out of the Great Depression to basically late ’70s, early 1980s, just almost every piece of legislation that passed through Congress was through the filter of: Does it strengthen the middle class? Does it create more opportunities for working families? And that was the litmus test. That switches in the early ’80s, when the Republican party says the role of government is to protect those who’ve already made it, let them keep more of the money, let them keep more power. And so we tried that for 30 years and ended up with an economy that almost ran over a cliff and crashed into the stone age….
This was not a natural disaster. The crash of 2008 was manmade. And that’s important because it has both halves in it. If we’re not careful, we create more problems,and it also means though it’s within our capacity to prevent this from happening. There were no financial crashes between the 1930s and the late 1980s until the deregulation started again.
Early Morning Open Thread: I Love A Woman Who Knows What’s WhatPost + Comments (92)
Late Night Open Thread
I’d just like to state that C.R.E.A.M., DeMint might be one of the greatest titles ever for a post here.
Do you all remember others that were just as good?