NO MORE HIKING. Especially with young co-eds.
Republican Stupidity
The Most Versatile State in the Union
Romney-bot Kevin Madden on CNN:
MADDEN: President Obama right now has suffered very greatly in the last few months because of the fight over health care, and he has very little political capital right now. So Republicans feel it is in vogue to criticize this president.
And then lastly, you have to also remember the fact that the president being on vacation in Hawaii, it’s much different than being in Texas. Hawaii to many Americans seems like a foreign place. And I think those images, the optics, hurt President Obama very badly.
Hawaii is an enigma wrapped up inside a riddle. Just a couple weeks ago, when an Alaskan named Sarah Palin visited, Hawaii was as American as meth labs and teen pregnancy. Now, when Obama visits the state in which he was born, Hawaii is all “foreign” and “exotic.”
The world’s greatest deliberative body
An alleged attempt to blow up a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.
Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has held up President Obama’s nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.
[….]DeMint’s objection creates a procedural hurdle that will probably take at least three days of debate and test votes to overcome.
It would be nice if a few Villagers here and there could take a break from bashing Harry Reid for not being Mike Mansfield and focus on crap like this.
Update. Ben Smith had a very good piece on this yesterday too (when he’s not quoting Bill Cosby and trolling for Drudge links, his blog is really pretty decent).
Update update. My link at the top is to a McClatchy article. Here’s a somewhat extended version.
The Swishboating Continues in Earnest
I wonder what the real message is here:
The Rubio link goes to a picture of a pig he was about to barbecue.
Soshulizm! In America!
Michelle Bachmann, welfare queen:
Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.
I’d be worried this would make Glenn Beck cry, but everything makes him cry.
(via one of you commenters but I can not remember where)
No Idea What They Are Even Debating
It is just so depressing so many deeply stupid people are serving in Congress. Here is the latest:
Spending in health care is going to increase no matter what happens. It is going to increase at a completely unsustainable rate if we do nothing. Which is why we’ve been talking about reforming health care for the last couple of decades, and precisely why we’ve been talking about it intently for the last two. It is why we have been talking about “getting health care costs under control” for years. It is why Republicans, for all my lifetime, have been screaming that Medicaid and Medicare are going to bankrupt us- that is, until a couple of weeks ago when in an act of sheer political cynicism, the RNC and the Republicans decided to guarantee unlimited and unchecked Medicare benefits forever.
It is almost like these Republicans are so damned stupid they have no idea what the hell we are even debating. How are they supposed to have a coherent response or be constructive participants if they can’t even figure out the debate?
And that is Tom Price, the Chairman of the Republican Study Committee. The Republican “think tank” in Congress.
And it is “Democratic,” you silly ponce.
Republicans For Torture
Via the Sullivan borg:
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MATTHEWS: Would you have stopped it? If you had been president at this time, would you have done what President Obama has done and stopped the water-boarding? Because that‘s another thing that people symbolically see as American, well, repression or tyranny or imperialism, whatever the hell they‘re calling it. Would you have stopped the water-boarding?
SCHOCK: I would not—I would not limit our intelligence agencies‘ ability to get information from people. If they have a ticking time bomb or—or some—a critical piece of information that can save American lives, I don‘t believe we should—we should limit water-boarding or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique if it means saving Americans‘ lives.
But I don‘t think it should be standard practice.
MATTHEWS: So, you don‘t have a—you don‘t have a principled objection to torture?
SCHOCK: Well, I…
They usually aren’t that blunt, but I just love that he thinks torture should be reserved for special occasions, like a really expensive cocktail dress or a nice cashmere sweater. And he really can’t walk this back, because even if they try the “waterboarding is not torture” nonsense, he went beyond waterboarding and advocated other forms of torture.