5.15.2010

Dems in Disarray! Democratic Congressional numbers plunge upward

Krugman!

GOP walks TARP tightrope: they voted for it, it worked, but they have to campaign against it

Republican Senators like John Cornyn (R-TX), John McCain (R-AZ), Bob Bennett (R-UT), and Judd Gregg (R-NH) are stuck in a nasty position. The TARP bailout, which they voted for, worked. It saved us from a deepening depression and helped to turn the economy around.

The problem?

One, it's bolstering the approval ratings of the interloper from Kenya. Two, the wingnuts hate it.

So the GOP has to run against something they voted for that worked because their constituents are crazy.

Ouch.

Interesting quote:
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who's retiring at the end of the year and is therefore unencumbered by the need to defend himself from the GOP base, has nothing to run away from.

"It was extremely effective. Not only was it effective and stabilized the financial industry, it also returned to the taxpayers almost $20 billion in interest and dividends that they would have otherwise not have."

GOP kills Jobs and Education bill by forcing a vote on porn

TPM

In an example of Republican obstructionism rendered beautiful by its simplicity, the GOP yesterday killed a House bill that would increase funding for scientific research and math and science education by forcing Democrats to vote in favor of federal employees viewing pornography.
Stay classy Republicans.

I'm really not worried about the midterms because I refuse to believe that there are that many Americans that are fooled by this petty, spiteful, superficial nonsense. Right?

Right?

%*&@

5.14.2010

Yeah, like watch out if he becomes President or something



Watch out if Obama ever gets in a position where he can, you know, do something.

She's the Baskin-Robbins of stupid. 31 Flavors.

Obama: GOP Drove The Country Into A Ditch. 'Now They Want The Keys Back'

Douchebag of the Day: BP CEO says spill is "relatively tiny"

Guardian UK

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume," he said.
Fuck you.

Seriously.

Fuck you.

Lewis Black: "Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourette's"

>

Colbert rips Glenn Beck for comparing himself to MLK

Most amazing letter of the year: foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda"

Sharon Underwood

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

Krugman: Why Libertarianism doesn't work

via Krugman

Thinking about BP and the Gulf: in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.
Interviewer: So tort law takes care of a lot of this ..

Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.
And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.

Dems in Disarray! Obama's numbers plunge upward

Obama Job Approval: Approve 52%(+1) / Disapp 41%(-1)

Highest in 10 weeks. These poll numbers are his Katrina. Why can't he close the deal?

5.12.2010

Senatorial ads that make you say "ouch"

But for entirely different reasons.

First, John McCain making William Shatner look like Lawrence Olivier. This is just really, really creepy.



Next is Joe Sestak hitting Arlen Specter hard with his own words.

Stewart on Conservatives Hypocritical Obama-Bush Comparisons, Colbert on BP


5.10.2010

RNC Attacks Elena Kagan, Thurgood Marshall and Ben Franklin

RNC Chairman Michael Steele came out firing today at Elena Kagan, President Obama's nominee to replace Justice John Paul Stevens.
(Given) her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution "as originally drafted and conceived, was 'defective,'" you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions.... blah,blah, blah
As Dave Weigel points out
(Steele) made reference to a 1993 essay in which Kagan wrote that the Constitution "as originally drafted and conceived" was "defective." Bloggers pointed out that the reference was to a speech from Justice Thurgood Marshall, referring largely to what everyone agrees were intolerable limits on the rights of women and non-whites in the original Constitution.
So this makes her a bad nominee? Admitting the problems with the original document now makes her an America-hater. At least according to the radical right. At this point, they've practically rendered Thurgood Marshall unconfirmable.

I'll point you to a quote from Benjamin Franklin, urging ratiifcation of the document to keep the country from slumping into tyranny: "I agree to this Constitution with all its faults"

So if the RNC intends to go after Kagan on those counts, they best go after Dr. Franklin, who we all know hated America and liberty. the same Dr. Franklin who, by the way, is the picture denoting Charity on Beck's wall.

Tea Party nutjobs go after Roger Ebert's cancer

Gawker

The esteemed film critic and prolific tweeter criticized five kids who wore American flag T-shirts and bandannas to school on Cinco de Mayo. The Tea Party beast was awakened, and mocked his recent cancer and the disfigurement it left him.

on Wednesday for what seems like a fairly open-and-shut case of trying to start trouble. Of course, to the nutbag right, this was not the case at all and the whole thing was anti-American. Last week Ebert sent this message in response to the story:
@ebertchicago Kids who wear American Flag t-shirts on 5 May should have to share a lunchroom table with those who wear a hammer and sickle on 4 July.
According to an Ebert blog post today, it was met with predictable outrage from people with predictable Twitter handles:
@lonestarag05: Its the USA not Mexico. They are allowed to be proud of their country. I wonder sometimes why you even stay here.
Ebert has defended the Tweet very eloquently here. He points out, using humor, reason, logic and fact that the kids had done something analogous to wearing a Union Jack on St. Patrick's day in Boston, or a Confederate flag to the Bud Biliken parade in Chicago — they were disrespecting the heritage of a community busy celebrating that heritage. Like, for example, "wearing the hammer and sickle on the Fourth of July." He adds in the blog post that those who defended the kids might try that "at a NASCAR race, for example."

Of course humor, reason, logic and fact are utterly alien to the Tea Party and their enraged acolytes. And they know no sense of proportion. Ebert, as this excellent Esquire profile outlines, has suffered through repeated bouts of cancer, and operations to remove that cancer, that have left him without a lower jaw. The picture above is the one that Esquire ran with that profile.

Knowing what we know about the Tea Party it shouldn't have been surprising when Ebert tweeted this last night. But it was sad.


UPDATE: Commenter Atlasfugged points out that these are probably among the Tweets that Ebert was responding to. MediaMatters have more. The man behind this particular batch is called Caleb Howe. He blogs at Redstate.com. The picture from his Twitter profile is inset.



Howe, of course, is perfectly entitled to say what he likes. We're sure Ebert would be the first to defend his right to free speech. But we've emailed Howe to ask for a comment, and whether he stands by his tweets as a proportionate response. As he cites Redstate as his official website on the Twitter feed, we've also emailed them to ask if they stand behind their contributor. Any responses will be posted here.