more truth

"Mr. Delay, you're always welcome on this program!"
- Chris Matthews to disgraced republican Tom Delay on "Hardball," 2-25-09


Yeah, Chris, that's pretty much the problem.

climbing the money tree

Ben Bernanke: "Nationalization, to my mind, is when government seizes the banks, zeros out the shareholders and begins to manage and run the bank, and we don't plan anything like that."


Yeah, instead the plan seems to be to give the banks that have been ripping off the taxpayers a whole lot more money that they can pay themselves and their shareholders, let them continue to manage and run the bank, and give the people who have footed the bill...

...the finger?

urethra, I have found it!

For the last few years, the so-called "mainstream media" have been insulting and denigrating blogs and bloggers as being undisciplined, unresearched, uncredentialed, unreliable, and generally lacking in understanding of how "hard journalism" is conducted. Well-known and high-paid commentators and pundits have lamented the horrible damage that ordinary citizens have caused to our discourse even as the media have gotten story after story wrong, have published discredited lies told by dishonest people who have personal gains at stake and axes to grind.

Now, they have a new resource to fight for truth and clarity in the news media.

Twitter.


Yes, you can't watch five minutes of cable news without being told what some twit or twat has tweeted on Twitter.

And they still wonder why they are the butt of jokes and the focus of mockery and disdain.

here's what was missing

filmed in

SUPERMARIONATION!

fazed & contused

In less than an hour of cable news, I have seen:

Democrats with testicles.
A clear promise to end the war on Iraq.
Rupert Murdoch forced to beg for forgiveness.
Wall Street and the banking industry told that the party was over.
A presidential pledge for universal health care for the American people.
Republican voter approval for President Obama increasing by 25% overnight.
Those who have been vacuuming the country's wealth being notified their taxes will increase to clean up the mess.


This is so disorienting. It's like the entire planet has fallen through some sort of dimensional doorway and now space and time are going to come to an en

take 'em down

JOIN REV. AL SHARPTON AND THE NATIONAL ACTION NETWORK BY EMAIL SIGNATURE OF A PETITION AGAINST THE OWNERS OF THE NEW YORK POST

Reverend Sharpton and the National Action Network are asking that you click here and join us by email signature of the following protest to the Federal Communication Commission (we are hoping for 1 Million Email Signatures):

"We the undersigned do hereby request an immediate review of the 'Waiver' extended to News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, a waiver that allows him/them to own/control one or more Television stations in the same city where they own one or more newspapers (New York City, NY). This seems to give an imbalanced monopoly to the public airwaves and an imbalance in commercial speech, in particular, in light of their blatant insensitivity to issues of race (i.e. the N.Y. Post Cartoon) and bias through the use of those publicly owned and federally licensed communication tools."

Electronically sign this petition by Clicking Here and sending us a short email with your name, address and phone number and in the Subject line simply write "I Agree With The Petition."

bad news, dude

Jim Bunning, junior senator (Asshole-Kentucky) has been trying to dig his way out of a rather nasty quote in which he said that Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader-Ginsburg was unlikely to survive more than nine months after her recent surgery for pancreatic cancer. He based his incredibly tasteless remark on actuarial data, and there certainly is some truth to the low survival rates of this type of cancer.

Of course, Mr. Bunning is free to make this observation, however lacking in gentility it may be.

I am also able to avail myself of actuarial data, and Mr. Bunning should probably know something important. He was born on October 23, 1931. That means that Mr. Bunning turned the ripe old age of 76 on October 23, 2008, a week and a half before the elections. The life expectancy for American males, according to the CIA World Factbook for the year 2008, is 75.15 years. That means the odds are that Jim Bunning probably won't be around long enough to see Ruth Bader-Ginsburg's passing.


With any luck.

life's cruel ironies

I was watching another Scarborough segment during which (the more-overtly-racist every day) Pat Buchanan was railing against the mythical "thirty million dollars for Pelosi's mouse" talking point. I don't have the quotes handy, but Pat was scornful of the very notion of preserving wetlands and wildlife, muttered something about correcting the mouse thing by "get[ting] a cat" and made it quite clear that he just doesn't grasp the concept.

Permit me to explain this to you, Pat.


The Earth is like a person. It is a bunch of seemingly unrelated biochemical systems that are intricately interwoven and that affect each other in ways that are subtle and complex. If you, in your wisdom as the mid-Sixties right-wing type, choose to pave over all of the wild areas, to dig, drill, and excavate with abandon, to obliterate the mating places and birthing places of thousands of species, to use so many pesticides and chemicals that the bees that keep all of us alive start to die off and disappear with no obvious explanation, if you rape the only planet that the human species has, it can't help but have detrimental effects.

Just imagine what would happen if you took a man, packed him into stiff, artificial clothing constructed to convey a message of prestige more than to comport to his body's movement, fed him unhealthful, over-processed food rich in fats and calories, loaded him down with all kinds of artificial chemicals to mask his human aromas, poured carefully-contaminated ethanol into him on a regular basis, prescribed a multitude of complex pharmaceuticals, made him sedentary and doughy, kept him out of sunlight so he was pasty and flabby, drove him everywhere he went with people to wait on him so he didn't have to lift a finger for himself, and thwarted the natural needs of his physical health in every other way possible.


In other words, if you want to see what you are doing to the Earth, take a look in the mirror.

finally, some truth in advertising

"If we can't talk about things we don't know anything about, this is gonna be a very short show."

- Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, 2-23-09, referring to White House Communications Director Robert Gibbs' criticism of the recent Santelli rant about the government plan to help Americans in foreclosure

A letter to Lt. Gov Steele

I read, with utter amazement, your quote: "Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job." If you are the new fact of the RNC, then I am forever grateful to be a Democrat. Your ridiculous statement demonstrate the degree to which you and your party will go to block any progress on any front, and to win at any cost. Ever hear of NASA? How about the military? What about the national highway system? Are those not jobs? How about the government workers themselves? Are those not jobs? Now let's focus on you, Mr. Steele. You may have a job, but apparently you are not doing any meaningful work.

Perspective on the previous, sans the well-deserved ranting...

A conversation with Dr. Brzezinski...

aaaugh!!!

What is it going to take to get the morons of the media and the government to understand that this economic crisis has nothing to do with "losing money?" Everyone is bitching about how much money has been "lost," and nothing of the sort has happened. What has happened is that people who were at points of power managed, by selling unregulated dilutions of financial instruments, to inflate the value of what real money was held by the system, got themselves paid massive commissions of real money based upon these inflated values, after which the house of cards they had built in order to extract these massive commissions promptly and inevitably collapsed, leaving the people who had been convinced that the elaborate houses of cards that they owned were extraordinarily valuable to suddenly find that they were worthless piles of paper. In other words, the bulk of the financial institutions gamed the world, got paid for it, and are now being given money by the countries that they bilked to make up for the money that the financial institutions themselves pocketed. The only money that has disappeared has gone straight into the coffers of the wealthy. The paper was never worth money in the first place, it was the means of siphoning money. We are giving money to the people who robbed us to replace the money that they stole from us. The plummeting stock market is not losing money, it is slowly determining the real value of what is left and will continue to drop until the value of the market is related to the actual value of what has been not looted. The bush-inspired 14,000 DOW was worth what the DOW is worth now, but the deregulation and lack of oversight of finance in this country permitted the financiers who were stripping the real value away from it to get paid for inflating it and walk away scot-free when reality came calling. They are mostly crooks and we, as a country, are now papering over their crimes and pretending that some horrible and unforeseen catastrophe has struck when in reality this was all a carefully planned game of three-card-monty on a historic scale.

The guillotine looks more like the right reward for these titans of commerce every day.

black helicopter republicanism

et tu, Herbert?

"The only problem with capitalism is capitalists."
- President Herbert Hoover

shit, meet fan

The state government of Kansas announced today that state income tax refunds would be suspended due to lack of money and that state employees would not be receiving a paycheck this week because the government can not meet payroll.

Let there be Soylent.

walk-in closet

Gayest website ever:

http://artofmanliness.com/

be very afraid

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/02/11/slain-neo-nazi-angry-over-obama-victory-reportedly-prepared-dirty-bomb-components/

You would think that a story about a wife-abusing cracker Nazi wanna-be in the backwoods of Maine with a history of anti-government crackpottery who was found to have enough materials for a large radioactive "dirty bomb" stored in his home after his maltreated wife finally shot and killed him would gather a significant amount of media attention in a country that has been thrummed into a constant state of paranoia.

You would think.

but he's a hero!

In a desperate effort to make himself look good, John McCain (R-Asshole) has been loudly critical of President Obama's first few weeks. “It was a bad beginning because it wasn’t what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people – that we would sit down together.”

You're a class act, Maverick. Only a republican would think that being a big old sore loser gives them any moral superiority. I'm sure your administration would have been a model of bipartisanship.

englishish

Quoted from a promo spot for an upcoming MSNBC program about drug abuse and addiction:
"It's like playing Russian Roulette with your life!"

It is no wonder our poor country is going down the toilet. Hey, dumbass, you know what else is "like playing Russian Roulette with your life?"




Playing Russian Roulette.

unbelievable

So Gregg backs out of the Commerce department position in the most ungentlemanly way possible, and what is our retarded media asking?

"How bad does this make Obama look?"



Yeah, right.

In the name of comity and inclusiveness, you invite an adversary to take a position of great authority and prestige and entrust them with enormous responsibility, they accept the offer with much fanfare, and are then so ungracious as to back out with no notice and a mealy-mouthed explanation delivered with the back of their hand, and somehow it reflects badly on...

...you?

a little more promising

Statement from the White House:

"Senator Gregg reached out to the President and offered his name for Secretary of Commerce. He was very clear throughout the interviewing process that despite past disagreements about policies, he would support, embrace, and move forward with the President's agenda. Once it became clear after his nomination that Senator Gregg was not going to be supporting some of President Obama's key economic priorities, it became necessary for Senator Gregg and the Obama administration to part ways. We regret that he has had a change of heart."



That's more like it. If you are not willing to adhere to the policies that the administration sets, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Or in this case, please do, you hypocritical piece of crap. Gregg couldn't figure out before the last couple of weeks that this was not going to be a republican administration? This was a calculated stab in the back, and the authoritarian sewage that is holding the republican party hostage deserves absolutely no compromise at this point. There are enough republican governors leaning on their congressmen to back efforts to stanch the hemorrhaging economy that the Democrats can get whatever they want. And fuck this implied filibuster bullshit. Make the traitors stand up on the floor and do it the old-fashioned way. Make them show their cards, it is time to put the rabid militant neo/theocon dog down once and for all, before it completely sinks this nation. Let's hope the Obama team finally learned the lesson that a lot of us have known for a long time.

Tony Clifton lives

write your own joke

love in bloom

no controversy, just crackpots and fools

Happy birthday to one of the greatest minds that ever lived. No, not Abraham Lincoln, although he certainly ranks very high on the list. Today is the two-hundredth birthday of Charles Darwin. While other people were also coming up with similar lines of thought at the same time he was, the branch of science for which he is credited, evolutionary theory, has over the last hundred and fifty years become the indispensable cornerstone of biology and as an explanation for the diversity of life on this planet has absolutely no legitimate competition. As a scientifically testable hypothesis, it passes test after test and fulfills prediction after prediction and is universally accepted by biological scientists worldwide.

However, to our eternal shame and embarrassment, the United States of America, the land of the greatest educational opportunities on the planet, is a country where four out of every ten people do not "believe in" the most thoroughly tested and confirmed explanation for the multifarous forms of life on Earth.

This kind of willful ignorance is taking a horrible toll on our society for which we will pay an enormous price, and there is no room for it in the world of the twenty-first century.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/Darwin-Birthday-Believe-Evolution.aspx

600 lb. gorilla

The United States of America will continue this long slide to civic dysfunction, global irrelevance, and economic ruin until the government once again fears "We the People."

free advice

Mr. Obama, in the future, please remember that you are speaking to Americans, and even republicans. Use shorter sentences, smaller words, and answers that are limited to three or four sentences at the most.



You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West.

You know... morons.

wrong on so many levels

Today, President Obama addressed a crowd in Indiana to discuss the massive economic crisis the United States and the rest of the world now face, and...


BREAKING NEWS!!!!

Alex Rodriguez admits to using steroids!

sign o' the times

So Allison Kraus and Robert Plant won the big Grammy last night.


You know, this "bipartisanship" crap is going too far...

how peculiar

Remember back when some republicans were considering pressing for the postponement of the elections and John McCain "suspended" his campaign to rush back to Washington, D.C. to FedEx seven hundred billion dollars to the banks so their executives and stockholders could keep themselves in Beluga and Bugattis without interruption?

Isn't it odd that the very same people who couldn't beam unaccounted-for amounts of cash to their biggest contributors quickly enough are the ones who are pleading for Congress to "go slow and do it right" and gnashing their teeth about socialism when it comes to trying to help out the people who work for a living with trivial things like health care and housing?


Of, by, and for the people, indeed.

Downbound Train

Sadly, America's best days may be behind her, but not because of the Democratic congress or our new leader, President Obama. It's because the friends and associates of our previous "president", george w bush, shit all over the constitution, pissed away the budget surplus and dragged the economy and the rest of the world through the mud in the name of "democracy". For the last 8 years America has been raped, pillaged and plundered by corporate American giants and other special interests, with the complete cooperation of the former administration. Even if Obama gets cooperation from the shamed, tattered and still defiant remains of the republican party, and even if he gets every move right, we are still headed for a train wreck. We have yet to find out if the train will completely derail and throw all 304 million Americans into the swamp, (where they'll be followed shortly by the rest of the world's population) or if the train will just break down for a while and only a few million people will be off-loaded into the swamp. Either way we are screwed and it's not Obama's fault.

Blame the decider. Blame the guy in the wheelchair who stood up for his friends in corporate America but wouldn't stand up for the black man at his inauguration. Unfortunately, neither one of those responsible had investments with Bernie Madoff. It would have made a sweet ending.

I still got it!

Guess who I just touched.

Twice.

unrequited

I realized this evening that I am at the same point in my relationship with my country of birth that I was at in my marriage when things started falling to pieces, and it all comes down to the same question.

Why should I continue loving a United States that doesn't love me?

Why should the citizens of this country continue to support a nation that overnights billions of dollars in assistance to the wealthy people who have manufactured our current problems, but balks and drags its feet and talks about "nanny states" when the people who pay for those bailouts are in untenable positions?

Why should the citizens of this country support a government that gives themselves premium health care but permits the health care system to ignore the sickest and most vulnerable ordinary people even unto their deaths?

Why should the citizens of this country bleed and die on foreign sand to prop up the cowards that wouldn't fight for it themselves?

Why should the citizens of this country live on smaller and smaller shares of the wealth they generate for the very people who are slicing their portions ever thinner?

If there are no good answers to these questions, is there any reason to save the United States?

disgusted

It is terrifying that President Obama and the Democratic political leadership are not able to explain to the country that the nature of the "bipartisan compromise" being "negotiated" in the halls of Congress can be best summed up by the question "how much and for how many years should the citizens and the civic health of this country suffer economic and personal devastation?"

The wealthy, and that includes the very people who are delicately "negotiating" this travesty, are not going to suffer. The other two hundred and ninety million people in this country ARE. The realists who come to conclusions by means of logic instead of ideology must vigorously attack the people who are endangering the continued existence of this nation, and they must continue to attack them until they are so marginalized as to be nonexistent. If they fail to do so, there will be no recovery, we will endure the end of the United States of America as we know it. There is no compromise possible with cancer. People who deny reality can no longer be permitted near the levers of power, our very existence is at stake.

I've been right about the big picture on a lot of this stuff the last few decades, and it scares me to find that these are the conclusions that I come to, but I can see no other options.

By the way, Mr. Obama, that aching pain you are feeling in your groin right now is the knee the republicans gave you while you were hugging them over the last two weeks. These people are not be trusted. Ever.

heavyweight Boxer

I'll bet poor Huckleberry is sad that he forgot to wear his pearls and lace hanky so he could clutch them appropriately.

Dear Republicans,

Do you really want to trim a lot of excess, wasted government spending and reduce the size of the government by nearly half?


Resign.

cul8r,
Milo

Dear Media,

The question is not "why is Dick Cheney talking to the media?" The correct question is "why is the media listening to Dick Cheney?"

kthnxbai,
Milo

better than baloney

I gave into a very occasional craving last night, and went to the store to get the necessary fixin's. I suppose, given everything else I've learned, that I should have predicted the results.

Guess which Freeloader luvs him some cheezburgers...

pretty much

"Speaking as a strong Obama supporter who put my energies and money into it, I am now very disillusioned with him. He spent the last two weeks empowering Republicans -- including negotiating with them to get more into Senate and his administration and giving them virtual veto-power over his agenda -- and also spending time on his personal cool-guy image (as in interview before the Super Bowl)."

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/our_highest_priority.php

two-liter dirty bombs

"Officers say they found four dry ice bombs that had been set off behind the restaurant. After investigating, police arrested two men, both employees of the steakhouse, for two counts of unlawful possession of explosives."

http://www.kwch.com/Global/story.asp?S=9787118



So carbon dioxide is now considered an explosive and people have been arrested for possessing it. Seems to me we should label global warning as a terrorist activity and waterboard the CEO's of Exxon/Mobil and other polluters to teach them the error of their ways. After all, those guys make more carbon dioxide than anyone else!

more morans

From today's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/03/AR2009020303782.html?hpid=topnews


"The basic problem confronting the government is that banks hold large quantities of assets that they value on their books for much more than investors are willing to pay. Banks cannot sell these assets without recording massive losses. "


Um, doesn't that mean that these large quantities of assets aren't actually, uh, ASSETS?

sad truth

Democrats like to lose.

in memoriam

Space Shuttle Columbia, February 1, 2003

Col. Richard Douglas Husband, USAF

Commander William "Willie" Cameron McCool, USN

Lt. Col. Michael Phillip Anderson, USAF

Capt. David McDowell Brown, USN

Capt. Laurel Blair Salton Clark, USN

Kalpana Chawla, NASA

Col. Ilan Ramon, IAF