Because you can live an Irony Free Life™.
As Senator Sam Brownback demonstrates by delcaring “shocked, shocked to find that Chinese authorities are demanding monitoring of internet activities by hotels of their guests,”after voting for exactly the same thing for the entire population of the United States.
Leave Claude Rains to Claude Rains.
They are asking for the Security Council to delay any investigation for 12 months.
The official reason is because they believe that an indictment would “harm peace efforts”, but I think that it’s because there are other regimes out there, and I’m not limiting myself to Mugabe, who would be subject to possible prosecution from the International Criminal Court.
It appears that the Darfur rebels understand this too:
Djibril Bassole, the joint U.N.-AU Darfur mediator made his first visit to Sudan on Sunday to try to revive a stalled peace process. But Khalil Ibrahim, head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said his rebel group would no longer recognise AU efforts to mediate a peace process.
“The African Union is a biased organisation and is protecting dictators and neglecting the African people,” Ibrahim, head of JEM, the most militarily powerful rebel group, told Reuters from Darfur.
Sherif Harir, a senior member of the Sudan Liberation Army Unity faction, also told Reuters that for any AU mediation to succeed, it would have to answer why it had taken such a stance.
“The AU by so doing has indicated to the people of Darfur that they can die and it’s not as important as protecting a president who has taken power by military coup,” he said.
Of course, it’s not like the African Union had much credibility left anyway.
Yep, he’s now saying that it’s possible that US combat troops could be out of Iraq in two years.
Flip-flop.
Anti gay bigot hotelier Doug Manchester donated $125,000 to the anti-gay marriage initiative in California, and how he is whining because he is facing a boycott.
Boo f*&^ing Hoo Mr. Manchester.
Bush has reportedly authorized the State Department to set up a US interests section in Tehran.
Canoodling with the axis of evil, I see.
More seriously, it is a mark of how weak Bush has become on the foreign stage.
It’s kind of detailed, so just go here.
Remember when I said that Pelosi has said that the Judiciary Committe might hold impeachment hearings?
No such luck. It appears that the committee will instead investigate the behavior of Bush and His Evil Minions™, and if they find something inappropriate, I’m sure that they will write a very strongly written letter, and perhaps hold a very upset press conference.
But as to impeachment, and a possible vote on impeachment, that’s just:
NOT ON THE TABLE! NOT ON THE TABLE!
Wimps.
The Rude Pundit notes that he gets a lot of chickensh#@ criticisms of Obama in his email from people who never listed to what Obama said, and so are shocked to find that he is pro gun, pro death penalty, pro “faith based program”, etc. and in his own profane way, says that these people are either clueless, or McCain concern trolls.
That being said, but he does state that there are valid critiques:
Like this one: Barack Obama’s reversal of his position on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was a craven, cowardly bullsh#$ move that ought to haunt him with the left (and libertarian right) for the rest of the campaign. By voting for the bill yesterday (including voting for cloture), Obama made a mistake that is the political equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s Iraq war vote. (They are not morally equivalent, since the dead would probably rather be alive and spied on.) And while there’s no telling how Clinton would have voted had she been the nominee, just as there’s no way to know how Obama would have voted on the war had he been in the Senate in 2002, the New York Senator was unencumbered and able to take the moral high ground and voted against the bill.
I honestly believe that the Rude Pundit cannot believe that he wrote that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
I can’t believe that I’m writing that Hillary Clinton took the high moral ground.
In any case, if Obama loses to the sick old man in November, he did it today, because at its core, much of the power of movement supporting him comes not from the number of supporters, but from the enthusiasm of those supporters, and a whole lot of them are seriously non-enthused.
He just made the same vote that Hillary Clinton did to authorize the war. The only question is whether it will kill his campaign as it did hers.
In any case, go read his post. He’s always insightful and entertaining, if somewhat profane.
On the Today Show, Cindy McCain goes back to the months old quote from Michelle Obama on pride in country to attack her patriotism.
They continue to surprise…in a bad way.
Everyone’s poster child for mercenaries, Blackwater USA, is now asserting that they bear no culpability for a plane crash in which their under trained and reckless employees killed US soldiers when they crashed into a mountain top in Afghanistan because the law of the land there is Sharia, and “Sharia law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.
Thats right, they are trying to apply religious law to a civil suit.
I have an idea. Let’s send Eric Prince to Afghanistan to stand trial there.
And once again, it’s the folks at McClatchy who call him on it, and no one else seems to notice.
This time, he’s claiming that the Chinese are drilling off the Cuban coast, and using that as a justification for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Well, not true, and not just the Chinese:
Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba’s shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is “akin to urban legend,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.
“China is not drilling in Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico waters, period,” said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon’s research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.
It’s not just Cheney. It’s also John Boehner, and George Radanovich.
If a Republican says that the sky is blue, bring a damn unbrella.
Or at least a lot more than you would expect from the guy who job was to Bush’s liar in chief*.
To be fair, at least from the excerpts on Politico, he does a lot more blaming of Bush’s staff than Bush himself, but still, the allegations are explosive:
I’m not going to buy the book, paying Republicans only creates more Republicans, but I’m definitely going to borrow it at some point.
*To be fair, this is the job description of every press secretary.
So, Joe Lieberman has decided to headline Pastor John Hagee’s next “Christians United For Israel” summit on July 22.
He is gladly sharing the stage with a man (Hagee) who in addition to calling Catholicism as being “the Great Whore” said that Hitler, and the Holocaust, were heaven sent, and Joe Lieberman has called him a man of God and compares him to Moses (see video below).
Joe Lieberman is so wrapped up in his twisted vision of his own sanctimony and his own revenge fantasies against those who he thinks have wronged (most recently the Democrats for not nominating him for President or renominating him for Senate.)
There appears to be nothing beyond Joseph Lieberman’s (yimach shmo) small and petty goal of self-aggrandizement.
*Kapo, not to be confused with Capo†. They were Jewish trustees in the prison camp, and did the Nazi’s dirty work there, frequently with a level of brutality and sadism that stunned even their Nazi warders.
†Capo is short for Caporegime, which, to quote the Wiki means , “The head of a branch of an organized crime syndicate who commands a crew of soldiers and reports directly to a boss or an underboss.”
Bush calls on Middle East nations to, “Empower women, release political prisoners, foster free trade, repudiate terrorism and defend freedoms of speech and religion.”
Seeing as how Bush is doing his best go the other way in the US, except possibly for the rich pig banker free trade stuff, it seems just a big hypocritical.
Well, it appears that at the debates, Charlie Gibson echoed the latest right wing talking point/lie, that recent cuts in the capital gains tax rate have increased revenues, and that tax increases cut revenues. (I must have missed this because I found the debates too painful to watch).
This, along with the assertion that people making $200,000/year (the top 3%) are somehow middle class show why one should not put innumerate idiots in positions of authority in journalism.
Saying that tax cuts in capital gains increase revenue is like saying that running a year long sale in a store will increase profits.
What does happen is that one the eve of a change in the capital gains tax, you have accelerated (in the case of a future tax increase) or deferred (in the case of a future tax cut) profit taking. This is a one time per tax change effect.
It’s exactly like a store sale. It produces a temporary effect, and any attempt to use it to guide long term fiscal policy is dishonest.
Well, we’ve had some shenanigans in delegate selection in California, where there are more candidates for Obama delegates than there were spaces.
Theoretically, the actual delegates are chosen at caucus, but the campaigns can, and do strike names from the list before the caucuses.
Originally, the Obama struck some 950 potential delegates off the list out about 1700 (about 55%), as opposed to about 40 out of about 1000 (4%) for the Clinton campaign, including Marcy Winograd, who sits on the Executive committee of the CA Dems, and contested the primary against hawk Jane Harman.
Apparently, their justification was that they were concerned about Clinton poaching their delegates (the Bitch made me do it defense), but of note is the fact that the people remaining were the bundlers and their girlfriends, so it was payback for the morally repugnant policy of bundling donations, one which the Obama campaign says that they do not need because of their massive small donor base.
It’s payback to the big donors.
Of note, once this all hit the fan, the Obama campaign backtracked, but it’s both stupid and sleazy.
Just another group of supporters to be thrown under the bus, as Obama is now signaling over “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, where he’s nominally opposed, but won’t consider the position of candidates for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which means that we will see a military man lobbying against this, just like Colin Powell did, which sounds an awful lot like the dog whistle gay bashing that he did with Donnie McClurkin.
Oh, well, I guess that I’ll be holding my nose when I pull the lever (metaphorically speaking, it will be either Diebold or Optiscan in November) for him.
My expectations are now low enough that I don’t think that I will be disappointed.
I might take a bullet for him.
This time, the object of my affection talks about John McCain’s integrety, and says, “He doesn’t seem to have any.”
He was talking about John McCain’s willful violation of campaign finance laws, and his embrace of bigot John Hagee.
Word up. Keep fighting the good fight.
First he promises, “no new taxes”, and then proposes taxing employer supplied health insurance, which amounts to taxes on about a trillion dollars a year, and then he says that Bush should veto the anti-torture bill.
Raising taxes on the middle class, and going pro torture to suck up to his constituency….some “straight talker”.
BTW, is it me, or is he looking increasingly physically feeble on the stump?
Yep, ths striaght talker has voted against making torture illegal. He wants to be president, and that means that he has to make nice with pro-torture Neanderthals.
Additionally, McCain has Bo Harmon as his national political director. If you recall, Harman ran the 2002 Saxby Chambliss campaign against Max Cleland of Georgia, which questioned the courage of a man who lost an arm and both legs in military service to this country.
At the time, John McCain called it, “Worse than disgraceful,” but it now appears that it was not so disgraceful that he can’t hire this pig felching rat bastard.
One hopes that the House will have some guts, but I doubt it.
This is about protecting lawbreaking by Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, not about keeping anyone safe or getting the cooperation of telcos.