Category: Hypocrisy

When Are These F%$#s Going to Stop Listening to James O’Keefe

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This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven.

Right wing videographer hack James O’Keefe* has secured yet another scalp, the president of NPR has resigned.

This guy has been proven to be a serial liar, but he releases his crap, Fox News picks it up, and suddenly, people are freaking out.

This just makes it worse for NPR, because they just capitulated to a terrorist.

*Who is not to be confused with my former classmate, founder of the Massachusetts Pirate Party, former Green Party candidate for Massachusetts Treasure, and all around good guy, James “Jamie” O’Keefe.

Well, Here’s a Surprise

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Warning, listening to Rush Limbaugh may cause substance abuse, impotence, failed marriages, and hypocricy

We had a report that right wing radio talk shows were hiring actors to juice up their phone callers:

But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.

“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”

Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.

, as the CJR notes, it’s Ensuring the authenticity of your programming… with paid, planted callers.

Well, we now have confirmation, because Rush “Drugs are bad, marriage is sacred, I did not f%$# little boys in the Dominican Republic” Limbaugh has now officially denied that he used actors as phoney call-ins.

I consider this to be confirmation because Rush lies about everything, and the story is nearly a month old, and any innocent person would have let it slip beneath the waves.

And A Maryland Democrat Joins the Ranks of the Morally Repugnant

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And here he is tweeting his support a month ago

When Maryland Delegate Sam Aora (D-Silver Spring) ran for office, he said that he supported gay marriage.

He’s one of the cosponsors for the bill that provides for recognition of Gay marriage in Maryland.

Well, now that it’s passed the state Senate, and looks like it is going to pass , he says that he is going to vote against it.

This isn’t just about a politician lying. This is about a politician making the issue the core of his campaign, and then betraying the people who supported him because of it.

It was at the core of his campaign.

He campaigned on in, and raised money on it.

Unsurprisingly, there is now a drum beat of people who are asking for their campaign contributions back, particularly since it looks like his vote will kill the bill.

This guy might be the biggest slime ball in Maryland, and that says a lot!

Credit Ain’t Due Here…

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The Obama administration has finally repealed the Bush Administration’s “Conscience Rule,” which allowed healthcare providers to refuse to provide service on moral grounds:

The decision guts one of President George W. Bush’s most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.

Friday’s move was seen as an important step in countering that trend, which in recent years had led pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, doctors in California to reject a lesbian’s request for infertility treatment, and an ambulance driver in Chicago to turn away a woman who needed transportation for an abortion.

Bush implemented this toward the end of his term, and it took Obama 2 years to repeal it?

Well, it appears that they wanted to split the difference yet again:

Soon after Obama assumed office, administration officials said they agreed the regulation was too broad and announced plans to rescind it. But officials indicated that instead of simply invalidating the rule, they would seek to replace it with a compromise. The announcement triggered more than 300,000 comments, which officials have spent months reviewing. The Federal Register notice announcing the decision cites concerns raised by both sides in the comments but concludes that most of the provisions were unnecessary and potentially problematic.

The rule will retain a provision that empowers the HHS Office of Civil Rights to investigate any complaints by workers who believe their rights under existing federal law were being violated. The office is currently investigating a complaint from a nurse who claims she was forced to perform an abortion in New York.

I think that crap like this comes from the top, and I think that Barack Obama is personally opposed to a woman’s right to choose, but finds the politics unavoidable, so feet are dragged, until the absolute minimum is begrudgingly done.

Very weak tea, and the absolute minimum that Obama could do without engendering a backlash from the base.

Not Enough Bullets

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No, but apparently we look like a bitch


This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter “B”, as in bullet, and banker …

So, Citi’s CEO, the incomparably incompetent Vikram Pandit, is saying that if if regulators reign in debit card fees, they will have to stick it to poor people:

U.S. banks may cut their services to the poorest Americans as a result of new U.S. financial regulations, including federal caps on debit card processing fees, Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit said Tuesday.

New U.S. laws, including the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act passed last year, “will change banking,” Pandit said in prepared remarks due to be delivered at an investors’ conference in New York Tuesday.

This makes me want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass …… OK, I want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass dressed in an Elmo suit, but that last bit is just me …… Or at least I think (hope) that the last bit is just me.

Let’s be clear here the debit card fees are a fee levied disproportionately on the poor, and he’s saying that if he can’t f%$# the poor like a bitch, then he won’t serve them?

This guy has a job because he f%$#ed so badly no one wants to take his job, because they would have to fix his mess, and so he, and the whole rotten bank, live off of TARP money, back door Treasury Department subsidies, and the largess of “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, and he has the nerve to suggest that he is anything but a leech at the public tit.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

No, This is Not The Onion…

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Just Because This Needs to Be Shared, So That His Shame Endures for a Very Long Time

But when a married Congressman trolls Craigslist for female companionship and sends a picture of himself topless, it certainly sounds that way:

Representative Christopher Lee of New York abruptly resigned on Wednesday night after a shirtless photo of himself, which he had e-mailed to a woman, was published on the Internet.
Mr. Lee, a two-term Republican from western New York, notified the House speaker, John A. Boehner, of his decision in a letter on Wednesday afternoon, after the scandal had erupted, according to senior Congressional officials.
Mr. Lee’s office released a statement in which he asked for forgiveness. “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents,” he wrote. “I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.”

The resignation came hours after Gawker, a gossip Web site, published an e-mail exchange that Mr. Lee, who is married and has a son, had with a 34-year-old Maryland woman he had met through Craigslist.

In his response to said woman, he described himself as “classy”.

This must be a meaning of the word “classy” I’ve been previously unaware of.

Scientists National Enquirer Reporters Discover a Mythical Creature

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The creature in question is a straight Republican, one John Boehner, who seems to spend a lot of his time f%$#ing staffers and lobbyists, as well as f%$#ing the country:

New Speaker of the House JOHN BOEHNER is embroiled in a bombshell sex scandal – involving at least two different women, The ENQUIRER has learned!

Capitol Hill insiders and political bloggers have been buzzing about an upcoming New York Times probe – detailing an alleged affair that the 61-year-old married father of two had with pretty Washington lobbyist LISBETH LYONS.

And an ENQUIRER investigation has uncovered a bedroom encounter that Boehner – second in line of succession to the presidency – allegedly had with LEIGH LaMORA, a 46-year-old former press secretary to ex-Colorado Congressman JOEL HEFLEY.

The Ohio native, a congressman for 20 years, and his wife Deborah, 62, have been married for 37 years.

It should be noted that Ms. Lyons has lobbied for industries that have shipped jobs from Boehner’s own district overseas.

So while he was f%$#ing her, he was also f%$#ing his constituents.

I know what you are saying, but the Enquirer nailed John Edwards about his nailing Rielle Hunter, so they do have some cred on this, particularly since people have alluded to Boehner’s wandering ………… Eye ………*

*I bet that you thought that I was going to use a crude term for a body part that is pronounced the way his name is spelled. While the thought did cross my mind, so the the phrase, “fish in a barrel.” It would be like Dick Cheney when he shoots a bunch of birds (or a lawyer) released right in front of him.

Bitch

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Evan Bayh, after saying that he would not run for reelection, because it’s all gotten too partisan, has joined a K-Street lobbying firm.

Just so you know, he didn’t leave because he did not like the partisan atmosphere, it’s because he wanted to be President, and realized that the whole party saw him as a smarmy corporatist opportunist.

Well, at least I’m not disappointed by this.

And in the Annals of Hypocrisy…

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We have Ayn “Atlas Shrugged” Rand, who took medicare to pay for her lung cancer surgeries, and Congressman Paul “We will transform our social safety net into a hammock” Ryan, who freely collected social security benefits after his father died.

I don’t generally begrudge people accessing social programs, but when you call people who need them “moochers” and the like, you are a hypocrite and a wanker.

Remember Always that the Cossacks Work for the Czar

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Go to the very gifted cartoonist’s website for a full size image, and buy some of his stuff

So when a political appointee of Barack Obama’s decides to use the King holiday to say that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the never-ending war in Afghanistan, because it is somehow or other a “just war”:

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

I understand that Mr. Johnson knew Dr. King, and went to school with his son, but seriously, using Dr. King to pimp the war in Afghanistan is so deeply appalling that it buggers the mind.

It is absolutely ludicrous when juxtaposed with the before and after pictures of Tarok Kolache.

When Does Antonin Scalia Start to Wear a White Robe?

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He is now saying that absent legislation, there is a private right to discriminate against women:

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a newly published interview in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Scalia said that while the Constitution does not disallow the passage of legislation outlawing such discrimination, it doesn’t itself outlaw that behavior:

Seriously, when then Assistant Attorney General wrote that William Renquist wrote that “A judge who is a “strict constructionist” in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs,” he wasn’t kidding.

A strict constructionist is a judge who prejudges cases to benefit the powerful and corrupt.  They are results based jurists, and the depressing thing is that Scalia is arguably only the 4th most insane member of the court right now, after Roberts, Alito, and Thomas.

Unsurprising News

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The UN has internal maps of Afghanistan that show us losing the war:

Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year’s fighting season, countering the Obama administration’s optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago.

The Wall Street Journal was able to view two confidential “residual risk accessibility” maps, one compiled by the U.N. at the annual fighting season’s start in March 2010 and another at its tail end in October. The maps, used by U.N. personnel to gauge the dangers of travel and running programs, divide the country’s districts into four categories: very high risk, high risk, medium risk and low risk.

In the October map, just as in March’s, nearly all of southern Afghanistan—the focus of the coalition’s military offensives—remained painted the red of “very high risk,” with no noted improvements. At the same time, the green belt of “low risk” districts in northern, central and western Afghanistan shriveled.

A shocker here, neh?

We are being lied to by the administration and Pentagon.

Howard Dean, Call Barack Obama and Tell Him

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That you will run against him in the primaries unless he drops his idea to cut social security:

The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.

The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.

This is bad policy, it’s bad politics.

You could call it political Seppuku, but I think that is more accurately the deliberate and premeditated murder of the New Deal, and the marginalization of the Democratic Party for at least a generation.

I can no longer attribute this to incompetence or cowardice.  This is deliberate malice:

Obama is Now Blocking DADT Repeal

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So much for his promise to be a “Fierce advocate” for the LGBT:

Sources on the Hill are telling me a big reason DADT repeal isn’t moving faster comes right from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Despite President Obama’s public support for repeal, with DADT stacked up against the START nuclear arms reduction treaty that Obama carefully brokered with the Russians earlier this year, the White House is putting its legislative push behind START.

At this point, with more than the 60 votes secured to invoke cloture on a repeal bill in the Senate, obstacles to repealing DADT legislatively are a simple combination of time and priorities. Time is short in the lame duck session, and DADT repeal is just one of many items the Senate would like to address before it adjourns. Where repeal slots into the remaining legislative calendar, and how much time is left in that calendar when it does pop up, will make the difference between repealing the ban and keeping the status quo.

I strongly disagree with the next paragraph though:

No one questions that Obama wants to see DADT end, or that he wants to see it end this year. The concern is over the priorities: Obama, it seems, wants START to come first. And with the White House pushing START (in daily phone calls from top White House officials, according to one source on the Hill), Obama could end up standing in the way of DADT getting done.

Truth be told, Barack Obama’s excuses for not supporting LGBT civil rights, whether it’s his slow-walking DADT, or aggressively defending it in court, or ignoring judges orders to recognize gay marriages where they are legal, etc. rivals John McCain’s flip flops on gay rights for their mendacity.

Remember That Justice Department Crackdown of Financial Fraud?

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Round up the usual suspects

It’s all theater, with a bunch of run of the mill low level grifters being rounded up being sold as real law enforcement:

The “Broken Trust” target list resembles that of the President’s “Interagency Financial Task Force,” which has concentrated on minor criminals while studiously avoiding the big (and still deadly) fish (see “A Banker Can’t Get Arrested In This Town”). Most of the Task Force’s indictments involved a category of financial criminal we call “ABB” — “anybody but bankers.” There were software entrepreneurs, family investment firms, some Florida retirement advisors … even a fraudulent psychic who claimed he could predict stock performance! (And no, it wasn’t Jim Cramer.)

Holder’s list of alleged “Broken Trust” victories is a similarly Faginesque assemblage of small-time grifters. It would make an ideal cast of characters for a Damon Runyon story or a Bertolt Brecht musical: There’s a Miami-based Ponzi schemer who used his loot to buy basketball tickets and make yacht payments, a retired Ohio cop who scammed fellow police officers and some firefighters, and the New Jersey hustler who scammed people so he could buy three luxury cars and two country club memberships.

This is clearly top down policy.

You see it from Treasury, you see it from the Department of Justice, you see it from Obama’s entire domestic policy team.

Barack Obama Wants to Gut Social Security and Medicare

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Social Security and Medicaid together do not match Medicare’s costs

Really, he just expressly said that to Steve Inskeep of NPR:

Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they’ll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

(emphasis mine)

It’s not helpful that he leads with a lie.

Anyone who has the vaguest idea of how to count knows that the elephant in the room (pun not intended), is not Medicaid, but Medicare, but Obama realizes that that the political consequences of going after that are simply too dire for him to mess with the seniors.

The alternative, of course, is something private, which means higher costs, since we know that both Medicare and Medicaid deliver healthcare for a lower cost than the private sector, and the expense ratio (the cost of managing the money) for Social Security is on the order of 1⁄10 that of most private plans out there.

We now understand why Barack Obama has been so deferential to the insurance and finance industries:  It’s because they own him, and he wants to sell the rest of us to them.

H/t Gaius Publius.

I’m With Jane Hamsher on This

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Barack “I suck up to Wall Street Like 1000 Hoover vacuum cleaners” Obama is not folding on tax cuts for the hyper-rich, he wanted them to keep their tax cuts all along:

It’s been clear for some time that President Obama made the political calculation that he does not want any of the Bush tax cuts to expire. He doesn’t want to be the guy in 2012 running for President on having “raised taxes during a time of recession.”
But the President also doesn’t want the political blowback of angering people who cheered him on the campaign trail when he promised to let the tax cuts expire. And so rather than just come out and just say that, he’s been actively trying to kill a Chuck Schumer deal to keep them from expiring on income of more than $1 million a year. It was a plan that put the GOP in an awkward position, and had thrown them off message in recent days — hard to be the people fighting for the 315,000 families who fall into that category over the 2 million set to lose their unemployment benefits by the end of the year.

The President argued against the Schumer deal, we are told, because he was concerned about “the cost [to the deficit] and the risk of redefining the middle class as those making over [should read under] one million.”

The President’s argument is, of course, pure crap.

I think that when we look at Barack Obama’s performance on issues of real reform, it’s clear that he falls short of his rhetoric because he does not want real reform.

Financial reform was mostly smoke and mirrors, with small steps, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, being driven by a need to avoid totally alienating his base in 2012.

The same goes for taxes, or for the give-away to health insurers that is laughably called healthcare reform.

Go read the rest.