Stewart and Colbert plan counter-marches on D.C. for 10/30

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Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will march together on Washington.

Or against each other in Washington.

Either way, expect plenty of Comedy Central fans to show up on October 30 when Stewart's "Rally To Restore Sanity" will meet Colbert's "March To Keep Fear Alive" in the nation's capital.

The duo have been hinting at a major announcement for several episodes in a mock response to Glenn Beck's own "Restoring Honor" rally that was held this year on the anniversary of a famous Martin Luther King speech at the same monument. There's no indication that the announced get-together is a joke, though. Both comedians are telling their audiences to book hotel rooms now (though for different reasons, as you'll see).

"It'll be like being in a chat room," Stewart explained. "But real."

Stewart punctuated his announcement on the earlier program with a homemade-looking banner reading, "Take It Down A Notch For America."

Colbert followed up with an announcement on his own show, and insisted that he would "notch it up a scotch."

Each man ventured into the other's studios for moments you'll just have to see for yourself ...

WATCH STEWART'S INITIAL ANNOUNCEMENT WITH COLBERT'S APPEARANCE:
WATCH THE COLBERT ANNOUNCEMENT WITH STEWART'S APPEARANCE:

Oh those Republicans... here's your 2010 lineup

This is mainstream?

Seriously?

EMILY's List slaps back at Sarah Palin: "Who Are You Calling A 'Radical?'"

EMILY's List, the political action committee aimed at electing pro-choice Democratic women to public office, is launching a new ad taking aim at former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her comments calling its supporters a "cackle of rads."

The ad is the second in the group's "Sarah Doesn't Speak for Me" series.

Republican election strategy = The Amazing Race

The GOP has gone full on nuts, nominating some real doozys (doozies? - whatever). In New York, you've got Chuck Paladino who sends out emails like this, "all in good fun".

In Delaware, they nominated anti-masturbation, pro-lying/crazy quotes, no intelligence Christine O'Donnell over Mike Castle. Castle, by the way, was up 10 points in head-to-head polling versus Chris Coons. O'Donnell is down 16, with Karl Rove - KARL FREAKING ROVE - calling her "nutty" and admitting she's unelectable.

The GOP/Tea Party feud has begun.

So where does The Amazing Race fit in? Well, the GOP electoral "strategy" (used loosely) of nominating fringe, far-right whackjobs might just cost them the gains they'd been hoping for. In other words, it will have same effect as the watermelons fired from this slingshot. Start at :20 for the good stuff. Show that knight who's boss.

George Carlin on the American Dream

h/t the mighty Hammerito

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year Lobbying. Lobbying, to get what they want.

Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money, They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people - white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue - these are people of modest means - continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.

That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

-George Carlin (May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008)

Yeah, let's all forget about the BP oil spill. It's o..ve.......r....?

This is not a photo of a paved road:

Yahoo! News (h/t Cesca)

It's a Louisiana waterway, its surface completely covered with dead sea life -- a mishmash of species of fish, crabs, stingray and eel. New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV reports that even a whale was found dead in the area.

Fish kills are fairly common along the Gulf Coast, particularly during the summer in the area near the mouth of the Mississippi, the site of this kill. The area is rife with dead zones -- stretches where sudden oxygen depletion can cause widespread death. But those kills tend to be limited to a single species of fish, rather than the broad sort of die-off involved in this kill.

Many scientists have feared that an influx of oil-eating microbes would lead to more Gulf Coast dead zones, since the microbes use large amounts of oxygen when they consume the oil particles produced by chemical dispersants.

Close up:


What have we allowed to happen?

Senate Republicans hate the middle class

Mitch McConnell said that Senate Republicans will unanimously oppose extending the middle class tax cuts unless the tax cuts for millionaires are also extended. This despite those pesky F-A-C-T-S that say that they provide only $.32 on the dollar in return.

Won't ANYONE please THINK about the MILLIONAIRES!?!?

Yahoo! News

Senate GOP leaders declared on Monday that Republicans are, to a person, opposed to legislation that would extend only middle-class tax relief — which Obama has repeatedly promised to deliver — if Democrats follow through on plans to let tax rates rise for the wealthiest Americans. The GOP senators forcefully made their case one day after House Republican leader John Boehner suggested he might vote for Obama's plan if that ends up the only option.

Seriously? I hope the DNC is producing ads with this in it and that they ram them down the GOP's throat. You know, since they're so obsessed with getting things rammed down their throat by a black president.

More important true F-A-C-T-S you need to know about budgets, stimuli and jobs.

These are not theoretical. Click to embiggen.

Newt Gingrich doesn't give a shit about your fact-based reality

Pay attention to the details: Chris Wallace (of FOX!) points out that continuing the Bush tax cuts for millionaires has the lowest "bang for the buck" of 11 different kinds of stimulus studied.

Newt's response to these facts? "BUREAUCRATS!!!!" He treats facts like a $10 whore (or his first two wives). They're less than meaningless.

Whenever confronted with reality -- with mathematical, objective reality, they simply blow it off and replace it with baseless ideology. Here's Newt Gingrich shrugging off the CBO's stimulus vs. tax cut numbers.

- Bob Cesca

By the by - Moody's Analytics has provided a chart showing the return benefits of various tax cuts versus spending increases. Of course, the facts are just liberal playtoys.

Gingrich goes full-on birther

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic dives into Newt Gingrich's headfirst dive into birtherism this weekend:

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.
Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

As Newt finds himself being outflanked on his right by the Beck/Palin connection, he's found himself increasingly playing to the wingnuts because that's the path to the nomination.

But D'Souza is an equivocating nut, and I don't care if he recently became a college president. I wrote a piece about an evening spent with him. He's an arrogant apologist for the right who can operate only in the realm of his theoretical. His theories don't adapt well to the real world. Hell, his nickname is Distort D'Newsza. But both are smart, educated men embracing whackjob paranoid ideas. As Chait alarmingly notes:

"Gingrich was once the most powerful Republican in America and remains an influential figure within the party. D'Souza has done stints at the most prestigous conservative think-tanks. The line between man and kook is getting harder and harder to discern."

Or, as Bob Cesca notes: Everybody knows you never go full Birther.

Media Matters captures the Morning Joe reaction. Interesting that Gingrich makes Scarborough look reasonable.