Texas wants to secede? Need help with the paperwork?

Big split at Fox over torture; Shep gets it, Hannity (gasp!) doesn't, O'Reilly douchebags

Fox News viewers witnessed a rather incredible scene on Wednesday as anchor Shepard Smith and Fox contributor Judith Miller (of CIA leak infamy) repeatedly and passionately condemned torture, with Smith declaring at one point, "We are America, we don't torture! And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train! This government is of, by, and for the people -- that means it's mine. That means -- I'm not saying what is torture, and what is not torture, but I'm saying, whatever it is, you don't do it for me! I want off the train when the government starts -- I want off, next stop, now!"

The full segment is worth a watch. And Smith felt strongly enough about the issue to speak out about it again as he was heading into commercial break.

"They better not do it," he said. "If we are going to be Ronald Reagan's Shining City on the Hill, we don't get to torture. We don't do it." Fade to black.



On FoxNews.com's online show The Strategy Room, Smith took his opposition to a whole other level. "We are America!" he shouted, slamming his hand on the table. "I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"



Sean Hannity had actor Charles Grodin on his show tonight, and the two men actually had some genuinely good natured sparring with each other over the news of the week. Hannity asked Grodin if he'd ever accept a book from Hugo Chavez or listen to a speech by a "brutal thug murdering dictator like Daniel Ortega." Grodin's respective ripostes were "I'd hand him my book!" and "I'd listen to anybody. I'm listening to you." Grodin then went on to ask Hannity if he was wearing mascara and if he had any plans to marry Ann Coulter. But that's not the fun part! This is the fun part:

GRODIN: You're for torture.

HANNITY: I am for enhanced interrogation.

GRODIN: You don't believe it's torture. Have you ever been waterboarded?

HANNITY: No, but Ollie North has.

GRODIN: Would you consent to be waterboarded? We can waterboard you?

HANNITY: Sure.

GRODIN: Are you busy on Sunday?

HANNITY: I'll do it for charity. I'll let you do it. I'll do it for the troops' families.

Later, Grodin called Hannity a fascist and repeatedly asked him what branch of the military he served in, the end.



Ellis Henican tries to give Bill O'Reilly some facts and logic. O'Reilly responds: "LOUD NOISES!" and shows his true colors. Bill cannot handle logic. In his mind, any investigation is compromised just because his party is not in office.

Oh snap: Hillary to Pence "Obama won the election"

Hopefully (naive, I know) this puts the whole "Handshake with Hugo" to rest. There is NO counter-argument. None.

Hillary's 3 points:
1) Obama loves America and wants her to be safer
2) The last 8 years of trying to isolate Chavez did nothing and did not serve our interests
3) Obama won the freaking election and has the right to choose the path he sees as best.

She didn't, but could have, added "So suck it, bitch".

Torture didn't come from higher up?

From Andrew Sullivan, an FBI interrogator speaks out.

Soufan notes that torture was applied to Zubaydah even though he had provided a great deal of actionable and accurate intelligence from traditional Western interrogation techniques. But he adds a critical detail: CIA officers were in the room during the traditional interrogation tactics. They knew he was cooperative. They did not want to start torturing him. Someone higher up ordered them.

The reason for the torture order apparently has to do with a suspicion from the higher-ups that Zubaydah had additional information he wasn't revealing to interrogators.

That information? The fake Iraq-9/11 connection.

Let's be perfectly clear here. This is a criminal conspiracy to go to war. Torture has clearly been used as a means to invent a pretext and, after the invasion, as a means to perpetuate The Glorious Cause.

Rove, Cheney diagnosed with Balzheimer's

(Huff Post)
Jon Stewart took a few minutes at the top of Wednesday night's show to marvel at the way Dick Cheney and Karl Rove had become, for the first time ever, advocates for such concepts as accountability, and transparency, and not telling the American people to go and suck it, every single day of their lives. "It seems the classifiers have become the declassifyees," an attitude that contrasted distinctly with about every clip of the two men the Daily Show had in their archives.

So, what gives? An acute inflammation of partisan hackery? Actually, the diagnosis was Balzheimer's Disease:

STEWART: Balzheimer's is a terrible illness, that attacks
the memory, and gives its victims the balls to attack others for things that
they themselves made a career of. There is no known cure. But it can be treated,
with body art.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Balzheimers Disease
thedailyshow.com

And in what sort of world do Dick Cheney and Karl Rove decry partisanship and passionately declare their support for government transparency? The only explanation is Bizarro Washington, to which correspondent John Oliver was dispatched. "It's here and only here where this news makes sense. There, he discovered that up is down, Barney Frank is straight, and the Dick Cheney is a "merry old soul" who the children call "Saint Dickolas."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Bizarro Washington
thedailyshow.com

Sean Hannity's "provable stupidity"

Lawrence O'Donnell demonstrates Sean Hannity's "provable stupidity" over the Chavez handshake

Colbert Sings For America: "Blown Away By The USA"

(Huff Post)
Republican senator Orrin Hatch just released a patriotic album "Amazed by America," and Stephen Colbert is pissed, pissed I tell you. This is just another example of a right-winger biting on Colbert's originality, which you would know had you purchased Stephen's "Blown Away by the USA" or "Stunned by the States."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Who's Riding My Coattails Now? - Blown Away by the USA
colbertnation.com

Torture: hours of family fun

Playboy journalist Mike Guy subjects himself to a real waterboarding, betting that he can make it 15 seconds. It's only holding your breath, right?


Jon Stewart reacts to the reaction to the reaction to the release of the Bush torture moms.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
We Don't Torture
thedailyshow.com

Jefferson's gift that keeps on giving (or it gets beaten)

Elvis Dingeldein writes for Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog and posted this really disturbing story about Jefferson. Now, I'm not surprised - I'm aware of Jefferson's contradictoryness. Just disturbed. disturbed at how someone can write some of the greatest statements of human freedom and natural rights ever... and give away human beings. How someone can be anti-slavery enough to want to condemn it in the Declaration (but the southern states would never sign on, so it was dumped) and yet gift one to the INCOMING PRESIDENT. I don't get it.

Read:
(Elvis Dingeldein)
Yesterday in The Histories™, 19 April 1809, former president and swimsuit model Thomas “I Like My Coffee Black, Like My Ironies; Also My Slave Mistresses” Jefferson made a handy Inauguration Gift of an indentured African servant named John Freeman* to newly presidentified pal James Madison.

Because The Ironies seemed to have been entirely lost on Jefferson, his note made no mention that on this same day in The Histories™, 19 April 1775, the American Revolution began in Lexington (See: Concord), Massachusetts, with The Shot Heard ‘Round The World But Really Only Felt By That One Redcoat With The Lead Ball In His Eyesocket. So yeah, that was a pretty good day to celebrate the 34th anniversary of a War For The Independencies by having a fire sale on fungible brown people with other members of the Plantation-Owning Secret Handshake Whitey Society.

Superdeluxe D.C. photos

I took my 8th graders to Washington D.C. last week. The weather was perfect, and so were the conditions to get some great photos. Here are just a few samples, along with Jefferson in the above post.













The bottom two photos are of the original Washington Monument. This tribute to George by noted sculptor Horatio Greenough around 1832 was deemed too risque. Apparently nipples weren't all they were cracked up to be.

Obama releases Bush terror memos; Bush legacy shatters

The ACLU has posted a link to the memos here, and Andrew Sullivan has written a brilliant piece about them here.

Suffice it to say that Bush has proven himself to be a liar when he said he was "shocked" by some of the torture methods being used. He couldn't have been shocked, he signed off on them.

Read the above graphic, taken from the memos. Read the ten forms of "treatment" used to get someone to "cooperate". Insects? I thought my country was better than this.

Teabaggers wrestle with logic, pinned quickly

You can actually hear the gears grinding and smell the sparks going on in the heads of some of these folks as their reveling in stupidity slams into the brick wall of logic and facts.


Daily Show's John Oliver attends a New Jersey tea party:

Tea Party Tyranny

thedailyshow.com

And Keith Olbermann catches Neil Cavuto of Fox in an outright lie about teabag numbers. In an accidental open mic conversation, Cavuto and his people agree on a crowd estimate of 5,000. But when he goes live, he claims the numbers are "double or triple" that number.

Scarborough mixes it up on Twitter, ends up looking like a Twat

(The Political Carnival)
Joe starts off with the idea, via a Pew Poll that he's misread, that Obama is the most divisive president in history.

Then Tweeter Cody jumps in:

The key to judging whether a president is polarizing is how the middle, or Independents, are seeing him. The reason is simple. A president might be as open to engagement as possible, but if his opposition is determined to destroy and demonize him from Day One, he can't do much about that. But independents give a better sense of whether the president is forcing the center to divide into two poles.

Joe:

I get it. All Bush's fault. Great. Forget all those Dems who knew about waterboarding in 2002 and loved it because they were scared.

Cody:

Answer the question Joe..... Did we prosecute the Japanese for doing the same exact thing to our POWs... or did we not?

Another poster, Shoq, reacted like this:

So Joe, let's understand . All that polarizing just started in January, right? 15 years of Fox, and you, had no influence, right?

Joe finally responded to Cody:

Americans did the "exact thing" as Japanese troops in WWII? That's just not so. The Japanese technique was far more savage.

Joe, responding to nobody in particular:

I will be back soon, but I'm wasting my time with people who call anyone who disagrees with them racists and rednecks. Wake up.

Jake Tapper came in out of nowhere, hat in hand, begging for conservative Tweeters to follow Joe's Tweet, 

"My God. Do no conservatives or moderate Democrats Twitter? I am Custer at Little Big Horn. As goes Twitter, so goes France":
conservatives -- @joeNBC is crying out for you to follow him ...he feels alone in the twuniverse

Joe ended with this:

Have a great weekend and try to have a long conversation with someone with whom you genuinely disagree. Show respect and learn something.

Shaking hands with dangerous criminals

Not unsurprisingly, the wingnut-o-sphere is going apeshit over the photo of Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Cause, you know, the other way was working so well. You know, the one where we lectured them about democracy whilst behaving in a most undemocratic fashion ourselves - what with the torturing and stealing elections and marginalizing dissenters and exposing our own CIA agents for disagreeing.



Anyway, AmericaBlog has posted the following photos of U.S. Presidents shaking hands with "dangerous men", many of whom had actual nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S.. Unlike, say, Chavez.









In case you're having a hard time with the names, they're: Republican Nixon with Chairman Mao, Republican Nixon with Leonid Brezhnev, Republican Ford with Brezhnev, and good old Donald Rumsfeld with Saddam Hussein. But the wingnuts are mad about Chavez. Go figure.

Let's let the Prez have the final say:

"The whole notion was that if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness," Obama said, recalling his race for the White House and challenging his critics today.

"The American people didn't buy it," Obama said. "And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it — because it doesn't make sense."

"It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States," Obama said. "I don't think anybody can find any evidence that that would do so."

Dangerous extremists? You? Noooo......

ThinkProgress followed one of the Tax Day Teabaggings.

Note the one guy, (mis)quoting the DHS report, who says he "prays to God you are" dangerous extremists. That's doing your side a ton of favors.

Here it is, Redneck-O-Rama. Judge for your own self.

Colbert and Frank Rich on the coming Homo Storm

The National Organization for Marriage recently aired an ad called "Gasthering Storm" (catch it here), designed to scare the living shit out of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. The Homo Storm is coming and none will be left straight in its wake.

The ad itself is laughable, even if the bigotry behind it is not. It shows actors portraying real people describing how gay marriage will take away their rights and mandate twice-weekly buttfuckings at the hands of a 6'7", liberal, English/Diversity Studies dual-major from Sarah Lawrence.

But as noted conservative Frank Rich points out in the Times:

This “national organization,” formed in 2007, is a fund-raising and propaganda-spewing Web site fronted by the right-wing Princeton University professor Robert George and the columnist Maggie Gallagher, who was famously caught receiving taxpayers’ money to promote Bush administration “marriage initiatives.”

Describing the ad, Rich notes:

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination.

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

And here, in all its glory, is the Colbert ad

The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

colbertnation.com

Boehner: Climate change "comical", caused by cow farts

Appearing on ABC's This Week, Minority Leader John Boehner was asked what to describe the GOP plan to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, "which every major scientific organization said is contributing to climate change."

Boehner replied: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you've got more carbon dioxide."

Comical? Glad to know that the Republican leadership thinks the end of life as we know it is comical.

Asshole.
(Huff Post)