Thanks for speaking up so early, when we could do something about all the lies you witnessed. Dick.
McClellan Throws Self, Rest of White House Under the BusPost + Comments (70)
by John Cole| 70 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Thanks for speaking up so early, when we could do something about all the lies you witnessed. Dick.
McClellan Throws Self, Rest of White House Under the BusPost + Comments (70)
This post is in: I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign
Death throes of a campaign can be ugly:
The Democratic National Committee is bracing itself for protests outside its Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting on Saturday in Washington, where the fates of the Florida and Michigan primaries could finally be decided.
Supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton are organizing to march and then gather on the street outside the panel’s meeting, scheduled for Saturday morning at a hotel in Northwest Washington.
“They’re coming up on buses, they’re taking the train, they’re Metro-ing, they’re coming up with friends,” said Allida Black, a professor at George Washington University and an event organizer. “We’re trying to flood it.”
Really, though- I am told this is being done in the name of party unity. You know, you have to break a few eggs and all that.
Also, Lanny Davis informs us that this is Obama’s fault.
*** Update ***
Meanwhile, Lanny Davis informs us that Hillary supporters are pissed off at Obama because… he is winning:
1. Couldn’t resist waiting one day after Sen. Clinton won West Virginia by 41 points to announce John Edwards endorsement.
2. Couldn’t resist waiting to win majority of ALL delegates (not just pledged delegates) to do victory lap speech in Iowa the night Hillary won Kentucky by 36 points.
The horror an unmitigated all- attempting to control the news cycle, during an election? The bastards! Announcing he had won a majority of delegates? Unbelievable! What other grave insults are in store for us? I bet that bastard Obama even announces he accepts the nomination at the Convention in August! When will the slights end?
*** Update #2 ***
The Obama campaign will be staging a sort of “counter-event,” of sorts. They will be registering voters in Virginia, and have asked people to refrain from turning the Rules Committee meeting into a circus.
Which event do you think will do more good for the party?
by John Cole| 74 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
This is quite a gem:
Jose is again the top boy’s name for babies born in Texas in 2007, evidence, as one approving blogger puts it, “that decades of Hispanic immigration has fundamentally changed this state’s character.” Did anyone ask Texans if, you know, they wanted to fundamentally change the state’s character? (You can search by state and year here.)
Why, those bastards. I bet no one asked Texans if they wanted to get older every day, but lo and behold, it is happening! This remark is so revealing, as it really shows you the modern conservative mindset- “THINGS ARE CHANGING AND IT SCARES ME TO DEATH! What can the government do to stop this?”
At any rate, I looked up WV and the surrounding states, and one name stuck out as exceedingly popular- Jacob.
It is #1 in WV, KY, and Ohio, #2 in PA and VA, and #4 in Maryland. Just seems like a whole lot of Jacobs, and there is pretty clearly a generational component to names. Jacob did not break the top ten in names in Kentucky until 1991, Ohio in 1992, West Virginia in 1993, Virginia in 1995, and Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1996.
Interesting, although I have no idea what it means, and I did not go through all fifty states, so I have no idea if this is a regional thing. I will bet there is a thesis for someone in there somewhere.
For the record, Jacob’s Ladder was released in 1990.
*** Update ***
BTW- The name Jose has been #1 in Texas since 1992, suggesting clearly the “problem” is worse than we thought.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign
Adventures in Lannyland is one of those posts that is just too good to quote any single part, and completely, totally, and relentlessly shreds to pieces the idiotic Lanny Davis modest proposal for Michigan.
This post is in: Election 2008, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
Ruh roh. Byron York shows his inner defeatist:
For many of us, the war was supposed to be about U.S. national security and only about U.S. national security. It would be nice if we could make Iraq a better place, just as it would be nice if we could make Afghanistan a better place, but that was never a sufficient reason to go to war. The reason to go to war was to find and kill every last son of a bitch who had anything to do with 9/11. And that job was not the main focus in Iraq, and in any event is unfortunately not finished.
One of the main reasons John McCain is facing such an tough job today is that we are now in the sixth year of a war that the president of his own party started by mistake. That’s a major headwind when you’re running for president; an error of that magnitude will exact a political price. Would anyone be surprised if voters say that they’ve had enough?
Is that the first time someone at the NRO has stated, without mincing words, that the Iraq war was a “mistake?” I thought that only defeatocrats and terrorist enablers felt that way (as well as the majority of the population).
As the right-wing pundits begin to realize what a horrible drag the Iraq War will be on their 2008 electoral chances, expect the rhetoric to continue to shift from “It was the right thing to do all along” to “Of course it was a mistake, everyone agrees it was a mistake by that idiot Bush, no one has ever argued otherwise, but now that we are there we have to WIN! (ponies ponies ponies!).”
Meanwhile, I will leave it to the rocket scientists at the NRO and elsewhere to perform this rhetorical shift all the while attempting to maintain the other rhetorical front in which they must attempt to convincingly argue that the war in Iraq has “made us safer.”
Good luck with that, sophists everywhere.
*** Update ***
Tim IM’s Derbyshire may have also called it a mistake (another reader reminds me Derb was against the war from the beginning, so that doesn’t count).
by John Cole| 42 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Have at it.
by Tim F| 138 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture
Unless you enjoy watching Lucas defile the memory of yet another great American film series, skip it.
Choice moments: an Ow, My Balls! joke that went on for what felt like half an hour. Cate Blanchett, the psychic heavy with the kaleidoscopic emotional palette of Oddjob, does two “psychic” things. She tries and fails to read Harrison Ford’s mind, then she opens a door while a bunch of burly guys with crowbars stand by and watch. A special forces squad of Russian WWII vets repeatedly fail to hit a slow-moving target fifteen feet away with automatic weapons. The American government tries to get Ford with a near-point-bank nuclear blast (unintentionally, it appears) and he escapes by hiding in a refrigerator. The Maguffin basketball game (it’s a skull. made of crystal.) that takes up 2/3 of the film might as well have court markings and a ref. The ending’s point was stolen from a better Jones film and CGI was borrowed from a second-tier SciFi original movie about giant snakes. Do we shoot Indy, or do we need him alive? Who knows? It seemed to change by the minute.
At least the Spielbergian gratuitous second ending only went on for four years eight months and three days a week and a half five or six minutes.
Honestly, I can make a better Jones film by closing my eyes and reconstructing the better parts of Temple of Doom from ten-year-old memories. There was the part where he’s about to shoot the two sword guys and realizes that he has no gun…and then the bugs scene…I think there was a shower scene with Marion, or I might be remembering that wrong. There was definitely something kind of funny that involved riding an elephant backwards. Short version, I just had more fun and it didn’t cost a cent.