Former Virginia Governor, Doug Wilder, who is allegedly a Democrat, but is refusing to endorse Craig Deeds, even though the next governor will have a lot to say about redistricting in the state.
Category: Wanker
I’ve Seen Clips of Tom Delay on Dancing With the Stars About 5 Times
And almost thrown up 6 times.
What were they thinking.
I beg the media, please stop showing us these clips.
Pathetic, Quote of the Day
David Axelrod, on healthcare:
“David’s in there — Axelrod — saying we’ve got to try to get ‘something.’ So, the new benchmark is, ‘Well, if we can do something, if we can do anything, then we can say we did healthcare reform,’” [West Virginia Senator David] Rockefeller said.
I know that a lot of Obama fans will be saying that this is just Axelrod, but that sounds a lot like the phrase, “If only the Czar knew.”
Obama will own healthcare, and he owns what his advisors say.
Adventures in Wankitude
The latest spin on the attendance at the “912” demonstration from the wingnuts, which implies that they thought that the attendance was anemic, was that the Washington DC Metro was simply unprepared for accommodating “massive” influx of passengers.
You know, less than 80,000 riders on a system that accommodates over 900,000 riders a day is not a big surge.
More telling, however, is that one of the loudest voices complaining about the quality of service is Representative Kevin Brady (R-TX-8), who voted against additional funding to the DC Metro earlier this year.
Votes against funding the Metro, then complains that it lacks adequate resources.
[on edit]
Yes, the Republicans are literally demanding that Barack Obama make the trains run on time.
The Best that Joe Wilson Can Come Up With is…..
His wife defending him on a web ad.
That’s kind of lame, but check the 30 second mark, when she says that she called him and asked, “I said, ‘Joe, who’s the nut that hollered out, “You lie?”‘
His wife inadvertently calling him a nut is the best that he can do.
What’s next, asking him mommy to defend him?
Affirmative Action for White Folks
Of course, for white people, you don’t call it affirmative action, you call it nepotism, and the poster child for nepotism, at least this week is Luke Russert, who upon having the opportunity to question Congressional heckler Joe Wilson in his first press statements following his heckling Barack Obama’s speech, chose to asks him about the Clemson/Georgia Tech game.
You know, it’s genetics. Tim Russert did this kind of sh&% all the time…If you were a republican on his show.
How Utterly Appropriate
John Stossel is moving to Fox News.
I imagine the this is best for everyone. ABC gets rid of a guy who wouldn’t know accuracy or journalism if it bit him in the butt, but whose well deserved termination would generate needless outrage from the first-cousins married for twelve generations brigade, and any network that employs Glenn Beck cannot have its reputation sullied by hiring him.
Alan Greenspan, Please STFU!
So, now Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, who said that speculative bubbles could never be spotted, and did everything he could to make increased leverage possible, is now saying that, “U.S. banks need to have higher capital.”
It might have meant something 4 years ago, you know, when you were lobbying for lower capital requirements, but now, it’s just trying to protect your so-called legacy.
People Who Should Not Be Reporters
Monica Hesse of the Washington Post, who went whining to their ombudsman.
You see, she wrote a puff piece about homophobic bigot Brian Brown, a major lobbyist against gay civil rights, and “The day before returning [from her vacation], she logged on to check e-mails — and wept.“
She wrote a puff piece, in the best tradition of Post writers being played by right wing blow-hards, and she crossed a line, and real people, as opposed to the right wing rent-a-crowd, took offense.
She was assigned the piece, and wrote it in order to ensure that she would not get irate email, and was crushed when she got irate email.
Notwithstanding her professed bisexuality, at least as related to the ombudsman, her problem is not her position on gay marriage, nor is it that she wrote a puff piece.
Her problem is that she clearly wrote this article to avoid confrontation, and when she got confrontation anyway, “she wept.”
She is in the wrong line of work. A journalist has to believe that irate letters are a mark of honor.
H/t Atrios.
The Phoney McCoy (McCaughey)
Less than a week after Jon Stewart showed Betsy McCaughey to be a complete liar who knows nothing about the healthcare bill, and next to nothing about healthcare, she gets a Wall Street Journal editorial.
You don’t have to be a stupid pathological liar to get an OP/Ed in the WSJ, but it helps, a lot.
On Being Clueless
Mike “Mish” Shedlock writes about a lot of things, and he tends to come from the position of the “Treasury View”, which states, among other things, that deficit spending cannot hasten recovery, since it takes money from other things.
It should be noted that this theory has been widely, from Keynes and Galbraith to Friedman, has been discredited since the 1930s.
In his latest, he goes after Paul Krugman for writing in 2004 that the Bush tax cuts should be rolled back to help with the deficit, and for writing in 2009 that the stimulus package, and the resultant deficit, are not matters of immediate concern.
Of course, in 2004, we were dealing with a frothy economy, most notably in the housing market, though it was still 2 years off peak, while in 2009, we are suffering from the worst recession, and worst banking crisis since the depression, with the central bank unable to lower rates because they have run up against the zero bound.*
Of course, Mich has the answer:
Q. What’s different?
A: Politics: a democrat ultra-liberal is in the White House.
(If Barack Obama is ultra liberal, I’m Jayne Mansfield)
It’s complete crap like this that keeps him off my blogroll and my feed list (it went there via a link).
I do actually check out some sites that I disagree with vociferously some times, Mat Rodina comes to mind, but in those cases I get insight into a point of view, in that case Russian nationalism, that I would not otherwise understand.
There are people who are cogent writers who help me understand opposing views. Mike “Mish” Shedlock is not one of them.
*Zero bound: When rates cannot be lowered, because they are effectively 0%.
High Broderism
Outsourced to Brad Delong, who notes that not only is David Broder a deeply immoral man, he suggests in that prosecution of crimes by his cocktail party friends is simply unAmerican, but that he is also lying through his teeth.
You see Broder says (not linking, friends don’t link friends to Broder) in the first substantive paragraph of his OP/ED (the first 2 ‘graphs are calling out Eugene Robinson for supporting the investigation):
First, let me stipulate that I agree on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials — even at the highest levels. I had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and I called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Actually, this is a flat out lie. While he did call for Clinton to resign over a blowjob, he strongly argued against impeaching Nixon at the time, when he wrote, “that he hoped it would fail–and that Richard M. Nixon would have his revenge.”
In the world of sociopaths like David Broder, Bill Clinton gets a blow job, so he must therefore resign.
Richard Nixon, on the other hand, uses the IRS, and the FBI, to pursue his political opponents, authorizes crimes against them, including attempted blackmail and robbery, and then is actively involved in covering up those crimes, and it’s “no harm, no foul.”
I think that David Broder is angry with Democrats, because somehow or other, he missed all the “free love” in the 1960s, and he blames the Democrats, for reasons that are unclear to me.
Godwin’s Law Does not Apply*
The reason that Godwin’s law does not apply here is because we are talking about Patrick Buchanan, and, on the 60th anniversary of the start of WWII, he’s writing about how the war really wasn’t Hitler’s fault at all, but the fault of those meddling English.
OK, we know that he is a pro-Nazi kook, and we know that his Dad was involved in the German American Bund, so we can only imagine what little Patty’s dinner table discussions were like, but why does this man have a soap box at MSNBC and other networks?
The issue is not that he is an anti-Semitic and racist kook, it is that mainstream media outlets still feel compelled to give him access?
To quote the late, great Molly Ivins, “The speech was so much better in the original German.”
[on edit] I did not link directly to Pat Buchanan’s article, though I read it, because I did not want to drive page views.
*Which states that, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” with a corollary that, “the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”†
†It should be noted that this law has not been considered to apply exclusively to Usenet discussions for at least a decade, and is applied generally to all forms of electronic text based communications.
Te Stoopid, It Burns US!!!!!
Maria Bartiromo asks 454 year old Congressman Anthony Weiner if why he is not on Medicare (1:37 in vid).
Umm…You have to be 65 to qualify.
Jeebus, is she anything but a life support system for a pair of tits.*
*Yes, legs too, she has nice gams. The point is that she is a profoundly stupid woman who has her job because she is eye candy.
Why Barack Obama’s Poll Numbers are Dropping
This makes perfect sense because his problem is that he’s been kow-towing to the left so much that he’s lost the country, what with all the war crimes investigations, the tax hikes for the rich, the crackdown on the banks, the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” and the thumbing of his nose at the Republicans every chance he gets. Not to mention the plans for full withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2012 and his full blown assault on the health care industry and insistence on a Canadian style health care system. You’d think Obama would have been far, far more cautious so as not to give the Republican freakshow any possible path to demonize them as “far left.” It’s not like they could just make stuff up and a lot of people in America would believe it, right?
(emphasis mine)
At least, that’s what an anonymous “top official” (**cough** Rahm **cough**) says.
What a Whiny Bitch
Joe Klein acts like a turd at a party to I.F. Stone’s grand daughter, where among other things, he claims that Wikipedia is “leftist”, and has clueless his ass handed to him, and then he basically describes her as a member of Glenn Greenwald’s “cult”, and then he gets his nose out of shape about this:
Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”
You know, the intersection of private emails and listserve (no hyphen, dude) is a null set. If you post to a listserv, and expect it to be private, you are a complete tool.
He further goes on, republishing another of his emails from the listserv, that while, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” he has never heard him talk about who well, for example, well things went in Anbar province.
Ignoring the obvious, that if you are, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” then you don’t know whether he wrote this or not, there is also the fact that Glenn Greenwald writes about civil liberties, not military tactics, but he continues to insist that because he, Joe Klein, has not read something on the subject, that Greenwald is somehow evil and anti-American.
It should be noted that the real cause of this is when Glenn Greenwald showed that Klein was holding authoritatively on the FISA legislation in Congress, and being completely wrong, because he had been, “he’d been lied to, by a Democratic Staffer,” ignoring the fact, that if he had read the legislation, or even if he had just had an intern read the legislation, he would have been known that what he was spouting was a crock of sh$#.
So much like Dick Cheney, Mr. Klein is a whiny bitch.
[update]Greenwald’s response, though it is rather more generally directed at the Washington DC Kule Kidz, than at Klein.
The Very Modern Model of a Modern Republican Candidate
Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonald mentioned in an interview with the Washington Post that he did a masters thesis on “welfare policy,” and the Post went and did some real journalism: they went to the library at Regent University, Pat Robertson’s diploma mill, which was called Christian Broadcasting Network University at the time that he filed his papers.
What they found was shocking, though not surprising:
- Called working women “detrimental to the family”.
- Opposition to birth control.
- Absolute ban on abortions, including where rape, incest, and the health of the mother are issues.
- Covenant marriage (basically making divorces much more difficult).
- Support for religious school vouchers.
- Opposed tax breaks for child care expenses.
I am so not shocked that he is a right wing medieval nut job, but I think that some Virginia voters might be.
I’m shocked though that the Washington Post actually allowed real journalism to reach its pages. This article is positively brutal, and deservedly so.
Your Liberal Media
The Today Show has hired ½ of the formerly underage alcohol driven comedy duo Jenna and Tonic, Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of GW Bush, as a correspondent.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
Republicans Can Go Cheney Themselves
It appears that the bubble headed bleach blond of DC political coverage, Politico, is reporting that “key conservatives” are warning that liberals may inappropriately politicize Senator Kennedy’s death.
They call it the, “Wellstone Effect,” which I guess means that a legitimate outpouring of grief over the death of a hero will be used by the America hating right wing, and a complicit press, to create the illusion that real human grief is somehow a sinister conspiracy.
As to those right wingers who are somehow all upset that it appears that Kennedy’s name will now go on the healthcare reform bill, let me say this: Teddy Kennedy was at his worst better than your best at their best: Ronald Reagan was not fit to shine the sole of Ted Kennedy’s shoes with his tongue.
Why Does Anyone Hire Juan Williams?
Juan Williams and Tree:
Stupid is in the foreground
When you look at his history, his aggressive opining on Clarence Thomas’ sexual harrassment of Anita Hill when he was harassing an underling him self, lasting about 3 months as host of Talk of the Nation because he was too stupid to do a marginally competent interview, and his reflexive embrace of the right wing talking points of the day, most recently with the idea that passing anything without Republican support is the “nuclear option”, one has to wonder why this man has a job, aside, of course, from Fox News, where he fulfills the critical role as their token “Tom”.
His history of incompetence, dishonesty, lack of knowledge about what he comments on, and ethical lapses, he should he should not be working anywhere near news.
Maybe he can get a job at the AEI or the Hudson institute. It’s where right wing tools go to die.