lovable liberal

Illegitimi non carborundum

2009-07-16T16:38:00.004-04:00

Mocking mock Latin while mocking the Senate's confirmation follies. Yeah!

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/Politico cartoon.

Health care bill - How bad is it?

2009-07-16T12:45:00.004-04:00

Fair and balanced headline courtesy Fox TV. They really don't even try anymore.

Since I've already thoroughly discounted the chance of ever getting an unbiased fact from Fox, why did I see this headline? The TV in the cafeteria at work was busy stove-piping the propaganda.

Splainin'

2009-07-16T00:53:00.001-04:00

I was all set to defend Republican Senator Tom Coburn. Sure, he's way out there on everything, but the first clip I saw of his Ricky Ricardo moment when questioning Sonia Sotomayor seemed to be discussing a hypothetical and legally suspect response by someone other than Sotomayor to a less than immediate threat. I was all set to take the media to task for trimming the quote to make it worse.

Uh, no. He did indeed direct his comment at Sotomayor.

Of course, it was bad enough even when I thought he only happened to retreat to stereotype.

Deal-breaker

2009-07-15T22:14:00.003-04:00

On health care, the Republicans want to do nothing:

Republicans on the panel, who voted unanimously against the measure, described the idea of a new public insurance option as a deal-breaker.

The lack of a public option would be the deal-breaker for health care reform.

Number one sign

2009-07-15T16:31:00.003-04:00

Number one sign your blogger is getting lazy: Lots of links and slender reeds of commentary.

This does not mean your blogger is going away. See also Atrios.

But after two years of one-person blogging, management and labor have agreed across the corpus callosum to cut each other some slack around here.

Of course, tomorrow there might be a story so interesting I have to spend 1000 words on it.

See figure 1

2009-07-15T16:23:00.003-04:00

Click image to see figure 1 rendered in a Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Reductio

2009-07-15T16:12:00.004-04:00

Make my funk the P-Funk!

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Why is Fred Thompson spamming me?

2009-07-15T00:21:00.002-04:00

Fred, I'm not interested, never have been. I know you need something to keep you busy in your retirement. Did you ever consider needlepoint? Star of MP3 - isn't that quite a comedown?

I'm going to try the unsubscribe link, see if that gets yet another yammerhead out of my inbox.

Talk to the invisible hand

2009-07-14T11:35:00.003-04:00

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Why not brag about it

2009-07-14T11:28:00.003-04:00

The Bushists, led by Darth, had a plan to kill Osama bin Laden, and they didn't want to crow about it, even to a handful from Congress? Uh, right. That totally makes sense.

More likely - though of course sheer speculation on my part - this is the cover story to quiet inquiries into the real secrets.

Bipartisanship is conservative

2009-07-13T22:59:00.003-04:00

Click image for full Jimmy Margulies cartoon.

CIA/media follies

2009-07-13T21:56:00.003-04:00

This Time report is what is technically known as wild-ass guessing. The program Darth Cheney reportedly protected was either assassination or it was domestic surveillance. Or it was unworkable and cancelled in 2008, I mean 2004, no biggie, move along, nothing to see.

Anyone can guess: How about enough resolution in satellite imagery to do facial recognition? (Why look straight down? Enemy of the State showed the problems with that.)

C'mon, give it a try! It's fun and easy, and there's no accountability for being wrong.

Enough bullshit! What we need from the media is not to print every goddamned unverified superficial rumor they hear. What we need is research, reporting, sourcing, and truth.

A bit of memory wouldn't hurt either. Could this "new" story relate to the unpursued Bob Woodward rhetorical bombshell of September 2008? Yes, at the time, I leaned to technology, too, since Woodward likened it to the Manhattan Project.

In any case, we still don't know.

Hall of mirrors

2009-07-13T18:41:00.000-04:00

CNN pimps for Liz Cheney. How else to explain this recycled item?

Here's the two-month-old rendition:

Look closely. It's the same story by the same author, both based on watching Fox, but today's item refers to the May item in both structure and content.

Lauren Kornreich is clearly a hack. Neither of these stories is worthwhile, neither has any rationale for Cheney as a candidate rather than an appointee, and neither has any response whatsoever from anyone who might raise such doubts. I've got to give this to Kornreich: She got paid twice for the same flaccid piece of writing.

Click images to see full original stories. Original. I crack myself up.

Timing Matalin would accept

2009-07-12T23:18:00.003-04:00

Never.

That would be good timing for the Bushists. Till then? No investigations of Darth Cheney arrogating to himself the power to abridge the Constitution.

More a commie vegan

2009-07-12T22:41:00.004-04:00

Well, the geniuses in big media have exercised their right to keep me from sending them links that actually work, so I'm sending my loyal (and disloyal) readers off to the Washington Post comics page for the last time. Pity, that. You'll have to search for the July 12, 2009, "Get Fuzzy". Trust me, it's funny.

Click image for the frustrating chore of searching for a full Darby Conley cartoon that would otherwise be a source of ad revenue at your destination. Oh, well.

Update: Here, on the other hand, is the opportunity to embed the entire strip. Go figure.

Remorse by the numbers

2009-07-12T22:29:00.003-04:00

Waiting for David Vitter...

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Plantation mentality

2009-07-12T20:54:00.003-04:00

A plantation is a place where crops are planted. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, yes, did have slavery, as did the entirety of the colonies, including Massachusetts. It's not just my favorite Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who was a hypocrite on human bondage.

To change a name because someone is ignorantly offended, even a 90-year-old man who has suffered real offenses, would be to accede to the triumph of feelings over reality. Could we just change the name because the long form is no longer useful, instead of from some trumped up word association game?

Operation Blackbriar

2009-07-12T09:56:00.004-04:00

We don't know what this program was. They tell us it wasn't waterboarding or the other torture methods. (You do realize that "harsh interrogation methods" is a euphemism worthy of the Nazis or the Soviets, right?) They tell us it wasn't the massive surveillance that essentially rendered the Fourth Amendment so much empty language.

They also tell us that it was never an "operational" program, even after nearly eight years. Oh, bullshit. To believe that, you'd have to have your head buried so far up your ass that it would be looking out your navel.

Dick Cheney, the true power of Duhbya's maladministration, ordered this program kept secret from Congress, kept immune from the oversight of democracy. He explicitly evaded the rule of law. (Again!) This was - and still is - the canonical impeachable offense. It's also a violation of his oath of office.

There is no way that Darth Cheney would have been interested enough in "planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year" to suppress disclosure of it. The New York Times is playing along to even print such nonsense.

Note: In all the wingnut foofaraw about Nancy Pelosi accusing Leon Panetta of lying about the CIA's legal obligations to brief Congress is the most obvious bullshit. Panetta did not say the CIA always briefed Congress in compliance with its legal obligations. He said that it was not the CIA's policy to withhold legally required briefings. Is everyone in the media too dense - or too happy to play along with the inside game - to notice this?

(h/t Boston Globe, where I first read the Times report on this)

Kristol-ography

2009-07-11T21:23:00.002-04:00

The common thread of Bill Kristol's advocacy: A completely incompetent politician is the perfect Republican figurehead. J. Danforth Quayle, Duhbya, Sarah Palin.

A truth that deeply needs repeating: There is no reason, not the slightest breath of a reason, to believe any position whatsoever that Bill Kristol advocates. He is a proven and virtually uninterrupted purveyor of frumious bullshit.

Talk to the hand

2009-07-11T21:09:00.002-04:00

The Chinese government is an authoritarian government. It may have abjured the command economy, but it's sticking with the command polity.

The open society is better for its citizens.

Click image for Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News cartoon.

Republican policy wonk

2009-07-11T20:19:00.003-04:00

No, not Newt Gingrich. Newt's strength is marketing the same old right-wing nostrums as if they might be something new. He's not going to move off of tax cuts as the be-all and end-all of the conservative movement. He's just going to dress that particular limp dick in edible underwear.

Charlie Baker (R-Swampscott) is the policy wonk of the hour, and he's going to get a lot less anonymous now that he has announced for governor of Massachusetts. There are a lot of idiots in the Republican Party (and in politics in general). He's not one of them.

I haven't talked to Charlie in a full thirty years - and if memory serves, we were probably talking about intramural volleyball. I didn't agree with his politics then and I don't now, but it's not stupid.

So, who loses from Baker jumping into the governor's race? Not Deval Patrick. He was already in trouble, and this doesn't make it worse.

The big loser is Tim Cahill. His political career is over. He split from the Democratic Party, aiming for a coalition of conservative Dems, independents, and centrist Republicans that are Baker's natural constituency. Cahill's best option now is to offer Baker his statewide network in exchange for ... what? I don't know. In any case, Cahill's network of conservative Democrats (by Massachusetts standards) might go independent, but GOP is an ideological bridge too far.

Christy Mihos loses, too. He still has money, so he can still run, but the GOP apparatus, such as it is, will rally behind Baker, since his pedigree is unassailable. If Mihos really has a jones to run again, he may be back in the independent column.

Kicking the can

2009-07-11T18:08:00.004-04:00

I'm with Glenn Greenwald on war crimes. Punishing them deserves a lot more than lip service, which is all we're getting from President Obama.

My guess is that Obama decided he could have his political agenda or he could have legal accountability for the prolific crimes of Duhbya's administration, and he decided to work his agenda. Unfortunately, he seems to be getting neither.

For me, the rule of law is what the United States is about. We've tried before to welcome Republicans back to the straight and narrow, but they've repeatedly interpreted the lack of prison time as exoneration - Watergate and its associated abuses, Iran-Contra, and now all the megalomaniacal abuses of the Constitution of the Cheney years. If some of these people don't do hard time, they'll be back the next time the Republicans hold power.

Meanwhile, Democratic abuses that aren't even close to official crimes, even low ones, bring impeachment. Yet any attempt to investigate, try, and hopefully convict and punish Republican abscesses in the core of our legal system is roundly decried by media and Republicans alike as "criminalizing policy disputes." The absurdity of that claim is breath-taking.

(h/t Jay Ackroyd at Atrios)

Country songs

2009-07-10T17:44:00.004-04:00

There have got to be at least a hunderd country songs in this sad little dust-up, starting with "Everybody Dies Famous in Wasilla". Unfortunately, they won't be good country songs. Miranda Lambert wouldn't sing this crap, much less write it.

Update: I really have to slap myself about this. Never mind the big media. What the hell are bloggers going to do without fish in a barrel like Sarah Palin? Seriously, it's Friday happy hour and there's nothing analytical to say. What am I going to do without lovely Sarah to kick around any more?

Of course, in a few weeks, she's going to be hosting an hour or two on Fox, making a million dollars a year (and bringing in numbers in the key demographic that make Bill O'Reilly apoplectic with jilted jealousy). They'll have her reenacting the bogus Stars and Stripes bikini pose with the rifle, and the 18 to 54 male share will go, schwing, through the roof. For wingnuts, anyway.

So I guess bloggers won't have to worry for long...

Bumper crop

2009-07-09T19:00:00.003-04:00

Because I don't have time or energy to comment (today) on the Charlie Baker announcement, a cartoon...

Click image for full Bruce Beattie/Daytona Beach News-Journal cartoon.

No Bushist affirmative action

2009-07-08T16:15:00.003-04:00

It's a puzzle that the Bushists haven't taken care of Alberto Gonzales better than letting him work a public job in support of affirmative action! Usually they're very attentive to keeping their own fat and happy.

It's a good thing he's not teaching Constitutional law, anyway.